Much the same could even be said about former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. On several occasions when the United Nations insisted that Iraq admit inspectors to check whether he had produced and was continuing to make weapons of mass destruction, he too reversed his position and yielded to his role’s informal external requirements. Stated more generally, there are good reasons why even the most authoritarian of leaders hold periodic elections. Even though the elections may be rigged or have only the leader’s name on the ballot and result in close to 100 percent of the votes being recorded in their favor, authoritarians still experience a periodic need to affirm for themselves and their publics that they have met the domestic expectations of their position.

In short, leaders must conform their actions and policies to the minimum expectations attached to their positions. Put more assertively, they are largely locked into their positions with only a limited capacity for bypassing the demands of their bureaucratic, domestic, and external constituencies.

Avenues for Change

If leaders are as locked into their positions as the foregoing formulation suggests, how can meaningful change occur? If the formal and informal requirements of leadership roles limit the extent to which their occupants can chart new goals and initiate new polices, how should we explain those moments in history when breaks occur in the paths that organizations or societies have followed through time? The answer has multiple components. One component involves new developments at home or abroad. A depression, a war, a terrorist attack, or a technological breakthrough exemplies the events that so alter the informal expectations to which leaders must be sensitive so that they are free—or, more accurately, required—to revise their priorities. Then there are generational differences, slowly evolving changes that lead to new values through which lifestyles at home and abroad are transformed and result in corresponding alterations in expectations towards leaders. On rare occasions, too, forceful leaders may be able to overcome the restraints of their roles and exercise discretion on behalf of values that their predecessors either did not contemplate or failed to appreciate.

People, for understandable reasons, tend to exaggerate the importance of leaders and downplay their own role in the continuities or changes of society. They fail to appreciate that the course of events is sustained by the interactions that endlessly unfold between their attitudes and actions at the micro level and the conduct of their leaders at the macro level. Followership is of such importance that often it is not clear who is leading and who is following.