Are managers and leaders one and the same?

Abstract

Although the debate about the relationship between management/manager and leadership/leader has been present in management science for decades, there is still no final general agreement about the character of the mentioned relationship. For many years the prevailing approach, according to which there is no relevant equality between management/manager and leadership/leader, has been replaced with a different one which highlights the high level of overlaping and similarity between the mentioned categories. In this paper, these two approaches are only conditionally labeled as traditional and contemporary. Accordingly, the key features of both these approaches are presented. The author of the paper considers that all these analyses of the relationship between management/manager and leadership/leader, which do not take into account the fact that within an organization it is possible to identify two prominent types of leadership/leaders (formal and informal), are defective and incomplete. The paper emphasizes that the relationship between management/manager and formal leadership/leader is not identical to the relationship between management/manager and informal leadership/leader.