Human Capital MBA
What a Century of Research Says About Leadership: From Trait Lists and Behavior Grids to Contingency Models and Exchange Theory
Why the search for leadership traits was abandoned around 1950 and then quietly revived on much humbler terms; what the Ohio State and Michigan studies actually found once researchers started watching behavior instead of counting qualities; why Fiedler's contingency model and Hersey and Blanchard's Situational Leadership answer the same question so differently, one holding up far better under testing than the other; and why leader-member exchange theory shifted the question from what a leader does to the relationship a leader builds with each individual follower.
2 Nov 2026 · 27 min read