Book Reviews: Leadership, Psychoanalysis, and Society Maccoby, Michael and Cortina, Mauricio (eds).

Abstract

This book provides an overview of the existing leadership literature and introduces its readers to an evidence-based approach to leaders, their character and followers. What is novel about this book is that it reads not like the usual collection of essays, where different authors have contributed chapters to a shared and overarching theme. Instead, it reads like a collection of scientific papers, that would perhaps be more at home in a journal. For an avid book reader, it takes time and effort to get used to this format.The achievement of the book is that it resists simply focusing on the leader’s personality traits or psychiatric symptoms. Throughout the book, the context, the followers and the leader are considered as connected. It was very pleasing for me, as an ex-associate at a business school, to get away from the leadership industry. Meaning, no fashionable movements like mindfulness, emotional intelligence, cha-risma or hero worship are pushed down the reader’s throat in this book. Nor is the ‘unholy trinity’ of strategy, permanent change and transformative leadership at the core of the contributions. A development which two colleagues and I castigated in a recent book called Breaking Free of the Bonkers (Binney, Glanfield and Wilke, 2017). In the same book we pointed out something important that is missing from the book under review: in a context of permanent transition in organizations, leadership is almost impossible, due to the obsessive defence against the chaos — micro-man-agement and controlling. In part one of the book, the reader is presented with a helpful summary of different ways of thinking about leadership and the underlying philosophy of the editors. They argue that leadership is context bound and therefore different situations and organizations require different qualities and skills from a leader. Equally, the examination of leaders requires an inter-disciplinary approach, if