Put differently, leadership never gives license to leaders to do whatever they please; they must conduct their affairs in the context of many constraints. Even the most authoritarian leader is bound by the limits of acceptability considered important by his peoples. It is dubious, for example, whether Joseph Stalin could have forced all men in the Soviet Union to wear wigs. Several years ago, to cite an empirical example, the Chinese leadership ordered the dismantling of all satellite dishes, but a visitor to any Chinese city today will find the skyline dotted with satellite dishes.

Considerable Followership

It follows that the dynamics of leadership is intimately and inextricably tied up with followership. No leader can take his or her followers for granted. If the performances of leaders fall short of meeting the minimum expectations of their followers, or if external circumstances change such that their performances fail to cope with the new situations, then the likelihood is that such leaders will lose favor and eventually be forced out of office. Some devotees and acolytes will of course remain faithful, but sound leadership requires considerable followership, a broad support among the relevant publics that can withstand the moments of unexpected downturn or acute crisis.

To be sure, in the case of authoritarian rulers, followership can be maintained through the threat and exercise of force. As the end of the Cold War indicated, however, such followership can be fragile and is hardly conducive to moving a society forward. Indeed, creative leadership requires a voluntary followership. The transformation of China from a communist to an increasingly capitalist society can be credited as much to the increasingly innovative and voluntary followership as to the increasingly flexible leadership.

It is here that theories of charismatic leadership fall short in explaining the nature of leadership itself. These theories argue that leaders employ their charisma to win over a followership and to overcome doubts about their leadership, implying that charisma is inherent in a leader’s character traits—his personality and style. But charisma is not simply a possession. A leader’s charisma is embedded in the orientations and needs of his or her followers. It can quickly dissipate, say, if a severe recession sets in, corruption is uncovered, or a war is lost. Long is the list of so-called charismatic leaders, even those with police powers at their disposal, who were toppled when the charisma they “possessed” failed to maintain the compliance of their followers. Thus charisma is a relational process, a set of ties between leaders and those who are ready to follow and comply with their urgings. It is rooted as much in the minds and emotions of followers as in the qualities of leaders.

Followership today increasingly derives not from tradition, but from how well leaders perform in their roles. Indeed, I have previously suggested that political legitimacy—that crucial foundation of viable societies—has undergone and is still undergoing a transformation in which traditional legitimacy has been replaced by performance legitimacy. In contrast to earlier epochs in which publics simply acquiesced to the policies of their leaders, today’s publics are more competent and, accordingly, more involved in the course of events. Thus they do not automatically comply with their leaders’ policies and, instead, accord legitimacy only to those policies that conform, at least minimally, to their expectations. Otherwise, as already noted and as is readily evident in the case of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, a leader’s tenure is likely to be tumultuous and limited, perhaps even cut short of his or her prescribed term.

Limited Discretion

This is not to argue, however, that the personal qualities of leaders are irrelevant to how they conduct themselves in office. Leaders are not prisoners of their roles; the unique qualities of any leader contribute to or detract from his or her successes. Every leadership position can be seen to have a realm that entitles its holder to pursue values, express personality, and apply experiences, enabling the exercise of discretion in pursuing policies. The higher the position in the organization, the greater the discretion accorded its occupant. Also, the way that leaders use this discretionary power that differentiates them from their predecessors and successors, even as the formal and informal requirements of their roles account for the continuities that mark different leaders who occupy the same position through time.

Perhaps the most important set of discretionary decisions leaders have to make are those in which they are subjected to contradictory pressures from their constituencies. Such role conflicts are increasingly pervasive in this complex time, when the boundary between domestic and foreign affairs is increasingly porous. This porosity is so much as to amount to a “Frontier,” where public affairs issues are addressed and contested. Indeed, few role conflicts on the frontier are likely to be more excruciating than those in which demands from abroad sharply contrast with those at home.

On the other hand, the conception of leadership as stemming from the occupancy of roles highlights the point that there is much more to leadership than the commitments, dedication, strengths, and weaknesses that any leader brings to his or her tasks. It must be emphasized that the discretionary realm of any role is limited and not nearly as wide as the realms comprised of its formal and informal requirements. The eleven postwar US presidents have differed in their ages, religions, education, party affiliations, philosophies, and prior experiences, but they have pursued the same foreign policies for the most part.

Some might argue that the current US President George W. Bush is an exception in this regard, and that his withdrawal from prior treaty commitments and his commitment to a policy of preemptive military strikes constitute a unilateral orientation that departs significantly from the multilateralism pursued by his ten postwar predecessors. But his unilateral orientations were jolted by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when it became clear that contesting terrorism necessitated working with allies abroad, with the result that he turned to the United Nations and yielded to other multilateral expectations built into the office that his predecessors had also honored. When the UN Security Council rejected his proposal for military action against Iraq, Bush’s unilateralist impulses surfaced again and the war was launched, only to be quelled when the war was declared over and allies were needed again to help rebuild Iraq. Fluctuations of this sort do not negate the power of role expectations; they only reaffirm the aforementioned point that the higher the position occupied by a leader, the wider the discretionary realm available to them.