Liderii ca obiect al reprezentării sociale [Articol]

Abstract

Leadership implies that leaders can be validated without reservation as an object of social representations. The main argument lies in the fact that leaders fit entirely with the best known criteria for recognizing what could produce the emergence of certain "common visions of the world" or of certain "position generating principles", through the ways they emerge and substantiate their behavioral strategies. However leaders first of all "appear in society in different forms". Then they also prove that they always have on their side a social group that "can build, develop and bear a social representation with reference to them" and which, by displaying this type of attachment, de facto ensures "the preservation of their identity and internal cohesion ". And finally, in leaders’ case, "we are faced with a social representation," because it is characteristic for them to fully maintain "close ties with other social instances in interaction with the group they belong to" and, at the same time, not fall under the domination of "regulating or controlling instances that would forbid them to exist in the consciousness of the others".