Leadership: Theory and Practice

Author: Peter G. Northouse | Edition: Seventh Edition | Pages: ~521 | Chapters: 16 | Generated: 2026-08-21

How to Use This Skill

• Without arguments: load the core frameworks and selection rules below.
• With a topic or framework: find the relevant chapter and read it before answering.
• With chNN: load that chapter, especially its mental models, anti-patterns, and evidence cautions.
• Ask for the chapter list to browse the complete source map.

Core Frameworks & Mental Models

Use this as a practitioner toolkit, not as a summary. Preserve the named model and its attribution, diagnose before prescribing, and state when evidence or context limits the claim.

Foundation: influence, power, and change

• Use Northouse's process definition of leadership when deciding whether an activity is leadership: an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal. Check process, influence, group, and common purpose; include reciprocal leader-follower interaction and the ethical responsibility created by influence.
• Use French and Raven's six bases of social power (French & Raven, 1959; Raven, 1965) to audit influence: referent, expert, legitimate, reward, coercive, and information power. Treat referent and expert as personal power; legitimate, reward, coercive, and information as position power. Prefer mutual purpose over coercion because threats and punishment substitute force for shared influence and can serve private ends.
• Use Kotter's management-leadership distinction (Kotter, 1990) to separate functions, not people: management creates order and consistency through planning, organizing, staffing, controlling, and problem solving; leadership creates direction, alignment, motivation, and inspiration for change. Prefer both over a false choice: order without direction becomes bureaucracy, while inspiration without execution becomes drift.