Followership Development And Enactment Among The Acholi Of Uganda PDF Download

The industrial era organizations used individualistic and dualistic leadership theory, which regarded followers as objects of leaders' influence to socialize them into passive followership irrespective of context and outcome. Consequently, organizations focused on leadership and condemned active followership as a toxic behavior that sabotages organizational processes and outcomes. However, the emergence of relational leadership theory in the information era, which regards followers as subjects of their own behaviors, has heightened the demand for active followership throughout organizational ranks, roles, and relationships. Nonetheless, since followership studies are still in their infancy, we do not know how followers develop and enact active followership. Thus, using a qualitative research paradigm as well as grounded theory case study approach, interview data collected from 39 participants on how they understand their followership identity, role, and behaviors; factors influencing how they develop and enact them; and how such factors influence the way in which they develop and enact them, yielded substantive information, which upon analysis generated a theory of followership development and enactment. Per the findings, active followership is the outgrowth of human dignity, which emanates from context-specific seamless continuous interactions between layers of root factors and fruit actions. It is enacted through a context-specific seamless consensus-building process of observation, analysis, and response. The study advanced followership theory by offering a theory of followership development and enactment anchored in a seamless paradigm that can be used to expand leadership theory beyond individualistic and dichotomous tendencies that absolutized the differences among leadership variables despite their seamlessness and Western methodological and empirical paradigm.