The Desirability to Develop Followership, a discussion on three perspectives

Abstract: During these past twenty years, we witnessed some important changes in the organizational context and environment that motivate scholars and management academics to examine the topic of followership more deeply. Then, in the leadership literature, we noticed the emergence of a small but growing number of articles that are devoted to this topic and that challenge the previous conceptions of leadership. Numerous scholars developed a more contemporary conception of followership, in which they conceive the role of followers as essential to ensure the organizational performance. Consequently, as it is already the case for leadership, many management academics and practitioners recommend organizations to invest and devote part of their time and energy to the development and training of followers. In this context and in front of such recommendations, the question of desirability is addressed along this thesis. More precisely, the purpose of this work is to discuss if it is really desirable to develop followers in the perspective of followers, leaders and organizations. In order to address the research issue, the thesis is divided in two parts. The first one is based on three dominant models from the literature and specifies what we mean by followership. A personal conception of effective followership is then developed and includes two important attributes: an appropriate level of engagement and an active critical thinking. In the second part, the question of desirability is discussed in the perspective of followers, leaders and organizations. For this purpose, we gathered a wide range of information that comes from a personal survey, several theoretical concepts and other empirical data.