Qualitative method for leadership research: Now there's a novel idea!

Abstract

This is one of my earliest journal articles, and remains my most cited and probably most influential. As the title suggests, this article represents the proposition that the grounded theory method is a valid and profitable direction for leadership research to take. I should specify at this point that I am talking mainly about organisational leadership, rather than leadership research from the disciplines of history or political science or anthropology and the like. Such a proposition would not normally sound overly ambitious, except that organisational leadership research has been dominated by quantitative methods for many years. Quantitative methods have dominated to the extent that organisational leadership was almost invariably researched using questionnaires. That scenario is now changing.