What Makes Us See Someone as a Leader? A Field Theory Approach
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We propose that what seems to be uniquely common to individuals perceived as leaders is that they all either meaningfully challenge the status quo or meaningfully resist challenge to the status quo over a sustained period of time.While we note that a relationship between leadership and challenge to the status quo has been alluded to in the literature, especially regarding (but not restricted to) charismatic leadership, a deeper theoretical development has been missing, particularly addressing the context of the social setting in which challenge may occur as opposed to a leader-centric view.Moreover, we observe that a commensurate connection between resistance to challenge and leadership is relatively unobserved and unexplored.We develop our argument drawing on Lewin's field theory and propose a theoretical explanation of how leadership emerges in the perception of others consequent to the sustained invocation and interaction of situational social forces, specifically meaningful challenge, or resistance to challenge, of the status quo.The theory lends itself to empirical study. MAD statementWhile the field of change management recognizes the connection between Lewin's field theory, the process of change and his classic experiments on leadership, it has missed field theory's connection to the perception of leadership acts and, more specifically, how leadership emerges in the perception of others.We draw on Lewin's theory to explore the process of leadership emergence.We focus on forces that challenge (and thus attempt to change) the status quo, as well as those that resist challenge (and thus resist change) to the status quo.Our paper makes a difference in extending leadership theory and practice by providing a more robust understanding of the challenge concept and its relationship to perception of leadership, with a detailed discussion about how challenging the status quo works in its social context.We also shed new light on resistance to challenge as a dimension of leadership, wherein leaders oppose change and strive to preserve the status quo.In particular, we explore the missing connection between Lewin's
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".