The formal academic study of leadership behavior was launched at Ohio State University in the 1940s. That effort culminated in Ralph Stogdill’s encyclopedic review of all the social-science research on leadership behavior from 1900. Stogdill’s study included a full chapter devoted entirely to various kinds of definitions of the word “leadership.” The most influential seminal work in this field, however, was James McGregor Burns’s award-winning study, Leadership, published in 1978. Burns, one of the nation’s premier political scientists, argued that political scientists should turn their attention from the traditional study of political power wielded by privileged elites to the study of social power shared by widespread populations of everyday citizens — in other words, by democracies full of leaders and followers working together to achieve shared goals.

Burns’s epoch-making work triggered creation of the Leadership Studies Program at Ripon College, founded in 1980, and eventually dozens of academic programs in colleges and universities nationwide. Ripon College’s program sponsored a minor in Leadership Studies that ran until 2013. It also produced and marketed more than 60 educational video programs to schools and libraries nationwide and generated two nonprofit organizations which still operate with headquarters on the Ripon College campus: the Wisconsin Leadership Institute (WLI), launched by the State of Wisconsin in 1995; and its auxiliary, Our Better Angels (OBA), founded in 2015.

Meanwhile, for tens of thousands of years, behavior among individual human beings and patterns of human interaction have been transformed by the impact of leaders in all walks of life. Thus, the notion of “transforming” leadership can be used as a verb or as an adjective: it can refer to the power of effective leadership to transform groups and communities or to the ways in which leaders transform the practice of leadership itself. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, especially in response to Burns’s call to action, historians and social scientists began taking the overt study of leadership behavior seriously, including the concept of “transforming” (or “transformative” or “transformational”) leadership — the kind of leadership that transforms human behavior and human communities.

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