Organizational Communication Commons^™

The Great Leader Project, James P. Burton

Organization Management Journal

This paper examines a project that has been incorporated into an undergraduate Leadership and Decision Making class. The project, the Great Leader Project, focuses student attention on the fact that effective leadership is not only a function of the specific traits and behaviors of a leader, but also a function of the characteristics of the followers and the leader’s context. In this project, a leader is randomly assigned to a group of students who are charged with analyzing the leader (both in a written report and an oral debate) using the concepts discussed in class. At the end of the …