Good reference book about general leadership theories. Helpful through its semi-exhaustive inclusion at the top-level.

Great book for basic leaderships theories. Well organized

Not a bad textbook - but I would read it if I was curious about theory of leading, not best practices.

This book dives into 14 different theories for leadership: their origins, their strengths, weaknesses and more. None are perfect. All have some component of truth.

Information is really basic. Gives a comprehensive look at different theories of leadership, but pretty dry and boring, and a bit superficial in terms of discussing different complexities and pitfalls. Chapters looking at gender and cultural diversity are really basic and though probably well meaning fall into the same sexist and ethnocentric shenanigans that they're trying to explain.

Literally one of the worst textbooks I've ever read (and this is coming from someone who read through microbiology and biochem textbook and found them rather interesting). The author cannot seem to describe major concepts and theories in a clear and concise manner and there are a lot of superfluous/trivial details in the book. If you're taking a course that uses this textbook, I strongly recommend going over the powerpoint slides your prof made, it's a lot more efficient to learn from the slides.

Dry

It's definitely one of the better textbooks I've read recently.

In summary: "here are a bunch of theories about leadership, but none of them are right. Also, here is a short chapter about female leaders and about how basically none of the other theories applied to women--we don't really know what works. Try growing a penis." Thanks for wasting my time.

This is my 4th book on leadership. I’m very tempted to rate it 5 stars but still feel too new to leadership books to know if this is truly is one of the best leadership books out there. As I’m in my first semester of my doctorate in education, I may change this rating later. I really like this book and the fact that is has chapters on servant leadership, ethics leadership, gender and leadership, culture and leadership, & so many others! I really like the format of the book that each chapter gives an easy to read overview, strengths weaknesses, case studies, and instruments to measure the leadership style in your own organization. For some of the theories, it left me wanting to know more- like how to really dig in and apply the leadership theory in more detail. I’m definitely going to keep this book though, defense it often, and possibly use a chapter or two with my team at work.

Great resource to learn about multiple types of leadership.

It was a very good source of information, it includes many theories about the different leadership styles and how they fit into certain contexts. The book is written in an academic language, it might not be interesting to many, but it is a useful book.

Nope nope nope. Lots of theories of leadership with little relevance to or acknowledgement of anyone other than western white cis straight men with economic means. Chapter 15 is about women and leadership...and rigidly adheres to the gender binary and has one sentence about the intersection of gender with other identities. Chapter 16 is about culture and leadership and is at best trying to be a cheat sheet for how different leadership traits read in different geographic areas. This book upholds the status quo in harmful ways. It’s maddening that it’s considered such a classic textbook on leadership when the people we need more of in leadership positions are completely or all but ignored by it.

The upside: if you get assigned to read this book like I did, the summaries at the end of each chapter are reasonable proxies for the info in the chapters themselves. I got a little more out of reading the full chapters. And it helped me feel like I had a stronger position from which to drag the book during class discussion. But if you just need to be responsible for the material, the summaries are definitely sufficient.