Contributing to Leadership Literature through a Nigerian Perspective

Abstract: Nigeria’s inability to use its resources to increase the country’s development status has raised questions about the leadership within the country. Investigations show though that there is a not much research performed on leadership within developing countries. The objective of this study is thus to contribute to existing leadership literature’s ability to understand leadership in Nigeria. This is performed in three parts. The first part uses a grounded theory method to interview 27 Nigerian leaders about leadership and to analyze their perceptions. The three relevant categories of how a leader is perceived, how political leaders are perceived, and explanations as to why political leaders are perceived as destructive emerged from the analysis. The second part takes the findings from the analysis and examines how the existing leadership literature corresponds with them. It is revealed that the existing literature corresponds with how a leader is perceived except that the participants put an emphasis on transparency not found in the data. The findings also show that the participants described their political leaders as egocentric and corrupt, with which the literature on destructive leadership corresponds. Lastly, it is revealed that the explanations provided by the participants as to why their political leaders are destructive are related to the individual leaders themselves, the political context, and the culture. Some of these explanations are found in the literature, but the explanations that political leaders are perceived as destructive because of multiethnic variety, democracy, religion, and poverty are not found. This study thus presented suggestions for looking at the moral development of leaders and followers, the relations surrounding ethnic diversity and democracy, as well as the culture influences of religion and poverty, if leadership literature wants to be applicable to the Nigerian country.