Jepson School of Leadership Studies: Dissertation Abstract: Suzanne Stigler Martin

Toward a Theory of Invisible Leadership

Written at Regent University, 2005

This study is the first computer-assisted content analysis of the writings of Mary Parker Follett, a political scientist and social worker with a substantial following among business leaders over 80 years ago. Her ideas are echoed in quality circles, empowerment, horizontal structures, and social networks as they are discussed in leadership theory and practice today. Ahead of her time, Drucker (1995) dubbed her a “prophet of management” (p.1) for her forward thinking. “Her assumptions anticipated our own time in its complexity, turbulence, and uncertainty, more adequately than most writers or practitioners who are currently grappling with those types of issues” (Klenke & Charabaghi, 2001, p. 10). Using a grounded theory approach to content analysis, 1450 pages of text and 16,000 different words were reduced to 45 codes and 5 code families.

The text was analyzed in three ways: word frequencies, coding, and tracing the development of the words leader, leaders, and leadership.

Leadership emerged as the unifying thread of Follett’s body of work. The results of this comprehensive content analysis showed that Mary Parker Follett was a trailblazer and an out-of-the-box thinker whose ideas and concepts expressed or anticipated many contemporary leadership constructs such as followership, conflict management, authority, control, and power and leadership theories including contingency theory, transformational leadership, the positive psychology movement, and complexity theory. The results of this research represent the foundation for the next step in theory development which will employ a grounded theory approach, anchored in the data presented here, to generate a model of invisible leadership through the inductive-deductive cycle of substantive theory building.