Rethinking Leadership: A Critique of Contemporary Theories

This title was incredible difficult for me to rate, so I copped out and rated it down the middle.

Beerel is obviously well-versed in leadership studies, and she condenses extensive literature on all of the covered approaches and related topics into manageable and accessible chunks. Her writing is scholarly without being stuck on itself. I appreciated that she wrote energetically about topics like mindfulness, and I was pleased to see a diligent exploration of neuroscience within leadership studies, spiritual leadership, and transpersonal leadership. I learned numerous factoids and found myself digging further into the literature on several topics because of this text. These are all good things.

But it’s not all good things. The tone of the writing veers into the snarky far too much for my taste. There is a way to suggest a more critical view of certain approaches (like transformational or authentic leadership) without being flippant or near-insulting. I am not against scholars citing their own work in subsequent writings, but Beerel’s prior texts were foundational sources for much of the discussion. I understand she wrote the book during the coronavirus pandemic, but in my opinion, she overused the pandemic as a case too often. It would be an effective highlight here and there, but otherwise, she may have wanted to consider a “leadership in the time of COVID-19” book. Finally, the chapter on crisis leadership was limited and devoid of the depth that it has received in scholarly literature. These were the negatives that made the book tough for me to finish.

I would recommend this title for leadership students, but unless the students were graduate or doctoral with some prior background in leadership studies, I would hesitate to make it a text for a course.