Leadership and Power, an Incompatible Mix?

Leadership is rarely defined by researchers purporting to debate the subject and the word and concept is used freely within academic discourse. This article avoids this issue by providing a new definition of Leadership and explores the concept of leadership in relation to the use of power. Management and Power are also defined and discussed to enable a discourse on the subject in question. It is argued that the term Leader is conflated with the term Manager (or supervisor) which leads to a miss-application of the concept of leadership. The article argues that Leadership is within the domain of the subordinate to ascribe and is not necessarily associated with management or a manager due to the fact that within an organisation, management incorporates and requires the use of power, particularly legitimate and coercive power as defined by French and Raven(1956). Management power is shown to be positive correlated with stress and so it is concluded that it is unlikely that leadership would be ascribed to management by a subordinate and so leadership cannot be compatible with power.