Leadership Followership And Trust Essay

Introduction
Organizational success is dependent on both leaders and followers. A strong leader “cannot expect others to follow; leaders must provide a good reason for others to follow” (Satterlee, 2013, p. 6). Similarly, effective followers “share a number of essential qualities, including intelligence and self-reliance”, and do not require constant attention or approval (Satterlee, 2013, p. 6). A necessary element in building the foundation for functioning relationships, trust is an “intangible intellectual asset, a skill, and an influencing power” for leaders and followers (Savolainen & Hakkinen, 2011, Abstract section, para. 1). This literature review considers the concepts of leadership, followership, and trust by examining how each is important to organizational leaders, as well as, strategies for implementing within an organization. “A good manager gets others to do what he/she wants them to do. A good leader gets others to want what he/she wants.”

Together we chose three important concepts: leadership, followership, and trust. Leadership characteristics and behaviors are often discussed, but that of followership is much less common (Jerry, 2013). The study of followership is many times overlooked, although research on leadership is abundant (Satterlee, 2013). The fact is, a leader cannot lead without followers, thus is why followership is important (Satterlee, 2013). Point blank, there is no leadership without followership, but still the topic of followership rarely arises (Hoption, 2014). As defined by Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman, trust is “the willingness of a party to be vulnerable to the actions of another party based on the expectation that the other will perform a particular action important to the trustor, irrespective of the ability to monitor or control that other party as a positive expectation that another will not act opportunistically” (1995, as cited in Satterlee, 2013, p.