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| The Kansas City Society of Association Executives (KCSAE) is dedicated to elevating the profiles of the Kansas City associations, educating public officials and to enhancing the performance of its members.
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New Attitudes of Followers, New Challenges for Leaders |
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By Nancy Perrin, CAE |
How do you define leadership? As an innate personality trait, a set of learned skills, a combination of both? The new book The Leaders We Need and What Makes us Follow (Harvard Business School Press, 2007) offers a more encompassing definition: a leader is someone people follow. Leadership, then, is a relationship that exists as long as people follow the leader. Author Michael Maccoby, Ph.D., a psychoanalyst, anthropologist and consultant, believes that organizations today are experiencing a dramatic shift in the attitudes of followers from those a generation ago.
Motivations of Followers
Maccoby explains that followers have both conscious and unconscious motivations. A powerful unconscious motivation is the Freudian dynamic of transference—our tendency to project experiences and emotions from past relationships onto the present. For much of the 20th century, followers’ transferences were generally parental, often father transference.
Continued in KCSAE News.
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