Introducing the Debate on Leaderless Management

Most employees occasionally wonder whether their leaders do a good job, and some wonder whether their job and life would be a lot easier and probably better without leaders. There is also a relatively recent branch of the leadership literature that has started heavily criticizing leaders and consequently we ask—a bit provocatively—what would happen if there were no leaders? Could, and would we, as employees, be better off were there no formal (or informal) leaders? Even if such a utopia may be desirable, would it be realizable in practice? We, the editors, explain how we perceive leaderless management at the start of the book project. We also discuss some patterns emerging from the chapters we observed while putting the book together. We finalize the introduction by briefly presenting the chapters and the book’s overall structure.