Leadership

Leading by Biography: Towards a Life-story

Approach to the Study of Leadership
Boas Shamir, Hava Dayan-Horesh and Dalya Adler, Department of Sociology
and Social Anthropology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

Abstract Most leadership theories view leaders’ influence as stemming from their
traits or behaviors. We suggest that the field of leadership studies has overlooked
another potentially important source of the leader’s influence, namely his or her life-
story. We argue that the leader’s life-story is an important source of information from
which followers and potential followers learn about the leader’s traits and behav-
iors, that the leader’s life story provides the leader with a self-concept from which
he or she can lead, and that telling the life story or parts of it is an important leader-
ship behavior. As an example of the life-story approach, we present a study of leader-
ship development themes appearing in leaders’life stories. We conclude by proposing
that a biographical and narrative approach to leadership studies should complement
the currently dominant emphasis on leadership styles, and by suggesting some
research directions that stem from this approach.
Keywords development; leadership; life-story; narrative; self-concept

I understand more clearly today what I read long ago about the inadequacy of all
autobiography as history. I know that I do not set down in this story all that I
remember. Who can say how much I must give and how much omit in the
interests of truth? (M. K. Gandhi, An Autobiography or The Story of my
Experiments with Truth)
Most leadership theories see the leader’s influence as stemming from his/her traits or
his/her behaviors or a combination of the two. In this article, we suggest that the field
of leadership studies has overlooked another potentially important source of the
leader’s influence, namely his or her biography. We argue that the leader’s biography
is an important source of information from which followers and potential followers
learn about the leader’s traits and behaviors, that the leader’s life story provides the
leader with a self-concept from which he or she can lead, and that telling the biog-
raphy is an important leadership behavior. We then offer a narrative approach to the
study of leadership life-stories, and demonstrate this approach by a study of leader-
ship development themes that appear in leaders’ oral and written autobiographies.

Copyright © 2005 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Vol 1(1): 13–29 DOI: 10.1177/1742715005049348 www.sagepublications.com
Leadership 1(1) Articles

Leading by biography – The role of leaders’ life-stories in the

leadership process
Our suggestion that leaders’ life-stories play an important role in the leadership
process is based on four arguments: First, the leader’s influence is mediated through
followers’ perceptions and beliefs. Even if followers are not always aware of the
leader’s traits or behaviors that influence them, at a certain level they have to perceive
these traits or behaviors in order to be influenced. Traits can never be observed
directly. Perceptions of traits are either based on information received from other
sources or constructed on the basis of observation of behaviors. However, in many
cases, the leader’s behavior cannot be directly observed by followers or can be
observed by them only partially (Meindl, 1990; Shamir, 1995). In such cases, fol-
lowers have to use indirect sources of information about the leader.
One source of information from which followers can learn about the leader and
on which they can base their beliefs about the leader’s traits and behaviors is the
leader’s life story. For instance, it is from stories of the leader’s self-sacrifice that fol-
lowers can learn about the leader’s courage and commitment to collective values, and
consequently place their trust in the leader. It is through such stories, as well as stories
that convey the leader’s competence and past achievements, that leaders may
accumulate ‘idiosyncratic credits’ (Hollander, 1958) that enable them to suggest
changes that challenge the current norms and beliefs of the group. Furthermore, fol-
lowers’ respect and admiration for the leader, and their identification with the leader,
may be based on what they know about the leader’s life story. Therefore, the leader’s
‘referent power’ (French & Raven, 1959), and in extreme cases the attribution of
charisma to the leader (Conger & Kanungo, 1998), may be based on such indirect
knowledge. In other words, leaders may sometimes lead by virtue of their biogra-
phies no less, perhaps even more, than by virtue of their observed behaviors or leader-
ship ‘style’. The term biography is used here to refer to all forms of life-stories, not
only written or published biographies.
Second, even in situations that give followers opportunities to observe the leader’s
behavior directly, their impressions of the leader are likely to be influenced by their
initial expectations of the leader and initial attitudes toward the leader, and the latter
are likely to be based, at least partially, on non-observed behaviors and traits. Fol-
lowers’ initial expectations of the leader and attitudes toward the leader may influ-
ence their subsequent relationship with the leader because they can constrain or bias
subsequent perceptual processes and because they may affect the leader’s behavior
toward the followers, thus acting as self-fulfilling prophecies (Dvir & Shamir, 2003).
While those initial expectations and attitudes are likely to be influenced by first
impressions and initial interactions with the leader (Liden et al., 1993) they might
also be influenced by information about the leader that precedes the first contact
between leader and followers. Such information often includes parts of the leader’s
life story. Followers or potential followers often know something about the leader’s
background and past achievements or failures before they meet him or her. Thus the
leader’s biography may influence their initial expectations and attitudes toward the
leader and ultimately their relationship with the leader.
Third, the telling of a life story is itself a leadership behavior. Several authors have
suggested that leadership concerns the management of meanings (for example

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Pfeffer, 1977; Smircich & Morgan, 1982). Leaders are engaged in various verbal and
symbolic behaviors that are aimed at ‘frame-alignment’ (Shamir et al., 1993) or ‘re-
framing’ (Fairhurst & Saar, 1996) of the meanings held by followers. It has been
argued that a major way by which leaders manage meanings and exert their influence
on followers is by telling stories. ‘Leaders achieve their effectiveness chiefly through
the stories they relate’ (Gardner, 1995: 9). Stories can educate, inspire, indoctrinate,
and convince (Gabriel, 1998: 135).
Many of the stories leaders tell are about the group or organization they lead, but
they also tell stories about themselves. The stories they tell about themselves are
means by which they convey important messages about their identities, traits, values,
and beliefs, and by which they try to justify their leadership of the group and their
right to represent the group and its values. The role-modeling function of leadership
is thus performed not only by the leaders exhibiting certain behaviors in front of fol-
lowers, but also, sometimes even primarily, by the traits and behaviors reflected in
the stories leaders tell about themselves. Furthermore, it is reasonable to assume that
many leaders are aware of the fact that telling their life story is an important leader-
ship tool by which they influence others, and they therefore construct and articulate
a life story that would serve this purpose. In other words, the life stories constructed
and told by leaders are part of their image building (House, 1977) or impression for-
mation (Gardner & Avolio, 1998) tools.
Thus Gandhi, in the preface to his autobiography, says he wrote it in part ‘to
provide some comfort and food for reflection’ for his followers (he refers to them as
‘co-workers’). Similarly, Hitler, in the preface to Mein Kampf, states that the purpose
of writing its two volumes (originally published in 1925 and 1927) is to set forth the
aims of the movement and draw a picture of its development. ‘At the same time’, he
adds, ‘I have had occasion to give an account of my own development, in so far as
this is necessary for the understanding of the first as well as the second volume, and
in so far as it may serve to destroy the foul legends about my person dished up in the
Jewish press’. Both Gandhi and Hitler address their stories explicitly to their fol-
lowers and say they have started to write them in compliance with followers’ wishes.
Hitler’s book, which is not an autobiography but contains autobiographical material,
was given to every newly married German couple from the late 1930s onward.
Lastly, the leaders’ biographies may be important for the leaders themselves. It is
likely that in order to lead, people must perceive themselves as leaders or at least
believe they have a right and an ability to play a leadership role. In other words, to
lead, people need to justify to themselves, as well as to others, not only their social
position, but also their sense of self-confidence and self-efficacy, and knowing better
than others where to go or what to do. Furthermore, leadership is a highly involving
role in the sense that the role and the self are relatively undifferentiated. In other
words, leaders are persons for whom the identity of a leader is a central and import-
ant part of their self-concepts (Gardner & Avolio, 1998), and for whom the exercise
of the leadership role is a form of self-expression (Bennis, 1989). It is through life
experiences and the way they are organized into a life story that people can develop
a self-concept of a leader that will support and justify their leadership role. There-
fore, to lead, people need to find or construct a life story that feels comfortable to
themselves and can be presented to others. For instance, Anwar Sadat’s autobiogra-
phy is titled In Search of Identity.

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In other words, it is argued here that leaders’ biographies are an important missing
link in leadership research because biographies produce leaders, and leaders, being
at least partially aware of that, produce biographies, and both processes are import-
ant to the development of a leadership relationship. Biographies produce leaders not
only in the sense that the leader’s life experiences contribute to the development of
his or her traits, beliefs and values, but also in the sense that they constitute a poten-
tially important source of information about the leader’s values, traits, and behaviors
by which followers are influenced. Leaders produce biographies both for their own
consumption, so to speak, because their biographies form the basis of their self-
concepts as leaders, and as a leadership act that aims to influence followers through
the messages the biography conveys.
A full-scale development of all possible connections between biography and
leadership is beyond the scope of this article. We shall focus here only on the stories
that leaders tell about themselves, namely their autobiographies, and only on one
aspect of the stories, the narratives of leadership development, namely the answers
contained in leaders’ autobiographies to the question, ‘how have I become a leader?’
We focus on autobiographies because they reflect all the justifications given above
for a biographical approach to leadership: they are likely to express the leader’s actual
or desired self-concept, and telling an autobiography or parts of it to others is an
important form of self-presentation and therefore a potential leadership behavior,
which may influence followers in various ways. We focus on the parts of the autobi-
ographies that describe the development of leadership because these parts are likely
to contain very basic and important messages, namely the justifications leaders
provide to themselves and to others for occupying a leadership role and trying to
exert influence on others.

A narrative approach to the study of leaders’ life-stories

Our approach to the stories of leadership development as told by leaders is not a
historical or psycho-historical approach. Previous studies of leadership development
used retrospective accounts of leaders’ lives in written autobiographies or oral inter-
views in order to discover actual events and experiences that had contributed to the
leader’s development. They have focused on events and experiences in the leader’s
early life or early career such as the loss of a parent, the successful resolution of an
early life crisis, difficult or nurturing family circumstances, high parental expec-
tations, travel outside the homeland, relationships with mentors or role models, and
involvement in many leadership roles early in life. They have attempted to connect
these events and experiences with the development of relevant leadership traits and
skills, such as self-confidence, independence, risk-taking, achievement motivation,
and power motivation (e.g. Avolio & Gibbons, 1988; Burns, 1978; Conger, 1992;
Kets de Vries, 1988; Kotter, 1990; Zaleznik, 1977).
In contrast, we adopt a narrative approach to leaders’ autobiographies. We do not
focus on lives but on the texts that describe lives. In other words, we do not view the
autobiographies as windows to the leaders’ actual lives or history but as texts that
operate at the time of their telling. We make no assumption that the events and
experiences related in leaders’ development stories are the actual factors that con-
tributed to their development, although this is possible, but rather that the events and

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experiences chosen by leaders to appear in their life stories reflect the leaders’ self-
concepts and their concept of leadership, and allow or enable them to enact their
leadership role.
The narrative approach assumes that a person feels, thinks and acts from a
‘meaning system’ that enables him or her to analyse and interpret reality in a way
that gives it a personal meaning (Kegan & Lahey, 1984). According to Lakoff and
Johnson (1980), the life-is-a-story metaphor is rooted deep in our culture. We tend
to assume that everyone’s life is structured like a story, and we give coherence to our
life by viewing it as a story. Narratives are not records of facts, of how things actually
are, but of a meaning-making system that makes sense out of the chaotic mass of per-
ceptions and experiences of a life (Josselson, 1993).
In other words, the life story, according to the narrative approach, is not a testi-
mony to the objective events that happened, but the manifestation and expression of
the events as perceived and interpreted by the individual that experienced them
(Widdershoven, 1993: 2). Personal narratives are much more than remembered. They
are constructed and involve thinking more than memory (Neisser, 1994). This storied
construction of reality has less to do with facts and more to do with meanings. Life
stories are not ‘free’ constructions; they are constrained by the events of life, but nar-
rators select the elements of the story to confer meaning on prior events – events that
may not have had such meaning at the time of their occurrence (Josselson, 1993).
Understanding life in terms of a coherent life story involves highlighting certain
participants and parts and ignoring or hiding others. This does not mean that narra-
tors of life stories always deliberately lie, though they may do so occasionally. More
often they see themselves as telling the truth by legitimately selecting and empha-
sizing certain events and participants in the service of this purpose, as reflected in
the quote from Gandhi that precedes this article.
Life stories express the story-teller’s identity, which is a product of the relation-
ship between life experiences and the organized stories of these experiences. Some
writers claim that life stories are a way of fashioning identity, in both the private and
public sense of that word. Others (Bruner, 1991, 1996; Gergen, 1994; Gergen &
Gergen, 1986) advocate that personal narratives are people’s identities. They view
identity as a story created, told, revised and retold throughout life. Both views agree
that we know or discover ourselves, and reveal ourselves to others, by the stories we
tell about ourselves (Lieblich et al., 1998: 70).
Life stories provide the explanation of what the person is at present. In other
words, the self as narrator not only recounts but also justifies. In telling their life
stories people construct a longitudinal version of self which explains and justifies the
present self. In this sense, narrators always know the ending of the story (Josselson,
1993). We live life forward but understand it backwards. In understanding ourselves,
we choose those facets of our experience that lead to the present and render our life
story coherent. An important implication is that while in one respect the beginning
of the story leads to its end, in another respect the end leads to the beginning because
the outcome (e.g. an achievement, a present role or a present self) serves as the
organizing principle around which the story is told.
Applying these considerations to the case of leaders’ autobiographies, it is reason-
able to expect that such stories will be progressive narratives (Gergen & Gergen,
1986) constructed to account, among other things, for the development of leadership.

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The outcomes in question in our case are a leadership role and a self-concept that
includes a leader identity as a salient element. Therefore, these outcomes can be
expected to inform the leader’s life story and serve among its organizing principles.
Because leadership is a highly involving role, namely a role that is not highly dif-
ferentiated from the self, the story of leadership development is also a story of self
development and vice versa. We can therefore assume that leaders attempt to answer
the questions ‘why have I become a leader?’ and ‘how have I become a leader?’ in their
life stories, even when they are not being presented with these questions by an external
source and even when they do not address them in an explicit manner. Leaders’ life
stories have to provide answers to these questions both for the leaders themselves and
for others ‘for, more than many forms of speech, autobiographical discourse expresses
more directly than other discourses one’s sense of self, identity, and motivation for
acting in the world’ (Illouz, 2003: 12). We can also assume that followers or potential
followers seek answers to these question in the leader’s biography in order to under-
stand the leader and find a justification for their own followership role.
In view of these considerations, we conducted a study of leadership development
themes in leaders’ life stories in order to examine how leaders’ life stories account
for and justify their leadership.

Method
Sources of data
In contrast with many studies conducted from a narrative approach, our purpose was
not to study specific individuals in their particular context, but to discover broad
leadership development themes that transcend particular contexts. For this reason,
and also because life stories are influenced by the particular circumstances in which
they are told and the particular audience to which they are told, we did not want to
limit ourselves to a single sample and a single method of data collection. Therefore,
we used two very different types of life stories: leaders’ published autobiographies
and interviews with leaders.

Interviews
Sixteen in-depth interviews with organizational leaders were conducted. Inter-
viewees were participants in an intensive leadership development course. They were
relatively young (in their 30s) managers from medium to large size high-tech organiz-
ations who were identified by their organizations as high performers who have
already demonstrated leadership qualities and have further potential for leadership.
The purpose of their participation in the course was to further develop their leader-
ship potential. They were all men. The interviews lasted between three and five hours.
All interviews but one (who refused to be taped) were taped and transcribed.

Autobiographies
Ten autobiographies of recognized leaders in the political, military, and business
spheres were read: Gerry Adams, Benazir Bhutto, David Ben-Gurion, Mahatma
Gandhi, Lee Iaccoca, Nelson Mandela, Golda Meir, Colin Powell, Anwar Sadat, and
Norman Schwartzkopf. The autobiographies were deliberately selected to represent

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a variety of spheres of influence, gender, and cultural origins. All autobiographies

were written at a relatively late life stage, when the writers were already established
leaders. Some of them were written with the help of ‘shadow’ writers. However, we
assume that due to the importance of the autobiography as a personal statement, even
in such autobiographies the selection of topics and events, emphases, and interpre-
tations are those of the narrator. For the purposes of this study and in order to achieve
comparability with the interviews we focused in our reading and analysis of the auto-
biographies on the chapters that describe the early, formative stages of the leader’s
life, up to their mid or late thirties, when a leadership role and identity had already
been clearly established in all cases.
There are obvious differences between the two types of stories collected, which
can be viewed as complementing each other. As we shall see, despite these differ-
ences, both sources of data surfaced similar leadership development themes.

Analysis
The narrative method to the study of lives views individual descriptions, expla-
nations, and interpretations of actions and events as lenses though which to access
the meaning which human beings attribute to their experience. This method is there-
fore interpretative in two senses, in the sense that the story itself represents an
interpretation of the narrators’ experiences, and in the sense that the researcher
uncovers and articulates the meaning system embedded in the story.
People do not tend to express their experiences, or to describe their sense-making
processes, in succinct, abstract generalizations. Underlying themes are unlikely to be
encountered in explicit form, as most people avert abstract theories and most story-
tellers revel in the concrete (Gardner, 1995: 58). Consequently, ‘it is the researcher’s
task to draw from life history narratives the principles on which the stories are
founded, not the task of the story teller’ (Musson, 1998: 16). Therefore, we did not
limit ourselves to tellers’ accounts about what contributed to their development or to
explicit references to leadership development. Rather, we included in the analysis all
sections of the life story that we think tell us something about the leader’s develop-
ment, even if the teller did not provide an explicit link between the told events and
his or her development. We approached the stories as ‘depositories of meaning’
(Gabriel, 2000: 15) and read them from the perspective of asking about the meaning
of the story from a leadership development point of view.
Our aim was not to reconstruct or interpret individual stories. Rather, our aim was
to distil, from the many stories we studied, the central themes of leadership develop-
ment. To perform this process, we read and re-read the life stories produced by both
methods of data collection and tried to identify major themes of leadership develop-
ment that emerge from the stories. This was done in an iterative manner until some
saturation was achieved in the sense that no other major categories were identified.
We tried to discover a small number of ‘proto-stories’ of leadership development that
would account for most of the relevant data in a coherent manner that provides insight
to the phenomenon studied.
The result of our analysis is not a typology of leaders, but rather a taxonomy of
prototypical development stories based on evidence provided by numerous individual
stories. We were able to identify four major development proto-stories in the material

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we analysed: leadership development as a natural process, leadership development

as a story of coping with difficulties, leadership development as a learning process,
and leadership development as finding a cause. Due to space limitations, we cannot
present our evidence in full. In the following section, we present brief summaries of
the four proto-stories we have identified and some of their suggested implications.

Summary of findings
Leadership development as a natural process
A major theme appearing in many leaders’ life stories was the theme of leadership
as a ‘natural’ development. This theme manifested itself in two main versions: as a
story of a born leader whose leadership was evident from a very early age, or as a
story of a ‘late bloomer’ who had inherent talents and tendencies that were discov-
ered when the opportunity presented itself.
The first, and main, version was directly conveyed in the interviews and indirectly
conveyed both in the interview-based stories and in published autobiographies by an
emphasis on early excellence and early development. Most of the leaders’ life stories
we collected include evidence of the leaders being special and having unique talents
from an early age, always filling roles at a higher developmental stage than their con-
temporaries. However, this is not true about all leaders. Some leaders (for example,
Colin Powell) describe themselves as ‘late bloomers’.
Both versions suggest that the leaders did not have to do anything to become
leaders. Leadership was not developed out of struggle and it did not require effort. It
was a natural process. Such leadership has a quality of obviousness, and an almost
fatalistic quality, as if the leaders could not be but leaders. Another implication of the
natural development theme, especially in its born leader version, is that leadership is
perceived and presented as non-contingent, or non-situation specific. It transcends
time and place boundaries, and has a vertical and horizontal quality. It is vertical in
the sense that leadership accompanied the person throughout his or her life, from ele-
mentary school to high school, youth movement, military service, university and
workplace. It is horizontal in the sense that it was present in various life spheres, such
as family, social circles, education, and work.
The natural and fatalistic perception of leadership offers the leader a convenient
justification of his or her leadership role, both for himself or herself and for others.
As a leadership tool, the logic of justification and follower recruitment contained in
the story of natural development is based on two elements. First, if it is the leader’s
fate to lead, it is the followers’ fate to follow. Fate cannot be resisted. Followers
cannot reject their followership role any more than the leader can reject his or her
leadership role. Second, the obviousness of the leader’s leadership and the fact that
it has in many cases been manifested in his or her being ‘special’ in some respects
from an early age provide ‘proofs’ that the leader indeed has the ability to lead. A
leader may not always be able to say to followers directly, ‘I am gifted’, ‘I am a
natural leader’, ‘It is my fate to lead’, but our interviews suggest that some leaders
do have such a self-perception, and our reading of the autobiographies suggests that
they convey this message to followers in indirect ways.

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Development out of struggling and coping with difficulties

The story of leadership development out of struggle stands in contrast with the
harmonious story of natural development. Leaders whose stories convey the theme
of leadership out of struggle usually emphasize the fact that they came from
disadvantaged families, low socio-economic status and/or a minority ethnic group.
The narrators relate that, as a result of struggling on their own, they found within
themselves the powers to win. They say they learned to be alone, to count on them-
selves and to be independent. They also developed a belief in themselves and a sense
of self-confidence that they can overcome even serious setbacks. In addition, they
attribute to their life story the development of their leadership motivation (the ‘turbo’,
the ‘hunger’), a fighting spirit, and a high tolerance of stress.
It is interesting to note that, in presenting their development as resulting from coping
with an ordeal, leaders follow both popular myths and some of the leadership develop-
ment literature. For instance, a recent book by Bennis and Thomas (2002) suggests that
leaders develop as a result of undergoing at least one critical transformational experi-
ence. Bennis and Thomas put this experience, which they call the crucible, at the center
of their model and suggest it is critical for leadership development: ‘It is both an oppor-
tunity and a test. It is a defining moment that unleashes abilities, forces crucial choices,
and sharpens focus’ (2002: 16). Like us, Bennis and Thomas base their conclusions on
interviews with leaders about their life stories. The difference between their work and
the current study is that Bennis and Thomas accept the leaders’ stories as true accounts
of development. We, in contrast, view them as constructed narratives which can serve
leadership purposes regardless of their accuracy or validity.
Obviously such stories can be very potent leadership tools. They attest to the exist-
ence in the leader of many qualities that are considered necessary for leadership –
strong will, self-confidence, proactivity, ability to take on big challenges and cope
with difficulties, independence, and toughness. They also enable identification with
the leader because of the suffering and the pain experienced by the protagonist, and
because they contain a moral element stemming from the fact that they often include
easier, but less moral, ways of coping (for example, becoming a drug dealer), which
were not taken by the leader.
Struggle stories contain both tragic and heroic elements, both of which generate
a substantial amount of emotion (Gabriel, 2000) and emotion facilitates identifi-
cation. The tragic elements facilitate identification with the suffering and pain of the
narrator. The heroic elements, which center on contests and battles won and revolve
around the axis of success and failure, generate pride and admiration for the narrator.
In political leaders’ stories (e.g. Mandela, Gandhi, Gerry Adams), the story of
struggling with difficulties and disadvantages is not only a personal story but also a
collective story. In these narratives, the leader’s story represents the struggle of a
group. When the stories represent a collective struggle, they imply an ability to go
into conflict, to fight and to win. Their representative character adds another basis of
identification to those mentioned above. They not only contain the elements of suffer-
ing, a heroic struggle against greater forces, and a manifestation of admirable
qualities like courage and strength, they also present the leader’s fate as symbolizing
the fate and identity of the entire group. In many respects, the story of coping with
obstacles and difficulties is a good story to lead with.

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Development as self-improvement through learning

The previous theme of development out of struggle suggests another theme, which
is development as learning from experience. However, this theme had many
additional manifestations not related to stressful experiences or the overcoming of
adverse circumstances. Many leaders describe their life as a series of learning or
training experiences and stressed their ability to learn from experience. They not only
stress their ability to reflect on experience, analyse it and learn from it, they also
present a liking for learning while telling their life stories, which are often presented
as tales of self-improvement through learning.
A special place in leaders’ life stories is given to learning from role models of
various types: distant public figures, parents, siblings and other family members,
teachers, mentors, superiors, and peers. The great emphasis on role models and role
modeling processes in leaders’ life stories conveys more than a lesson about develop-
ment as a learning process. It also conveys a lesson about the importance of leader-
ship. In telling their life stories, the leaders present themselves as role models to their
followers, more so in the autobiographies than in the interviews, which is perhaps
why role models were more salient in the former. In fact, perhaps one of the func-
tions of telling a life story to followers is to model the role-modeling process. Role-
modeling stories are stories of followership. By telling such a story, the leader
effectively says to his or her audience, ‘look how following others has contributed to
my development’. The implied promise is of course that the readers or listeners will
benefit in a similar way from adopting the narrator as a role model.
The emphasis included in leaders’ life stories on learning from experience and
from role models conveys several messages, which are potentially important both for
self-justification and for establishing a leadership relationship with others. First,
learning shows talent, and in this sense perhaps reinforces the natural leadership
theme. Second, both the ability to learn and the conscious effort to learn from experi-
ence also reflect certain attitudes such as curiosity, industriousness and the love of
learning, which are socially respected characteristics, and can therefore gain the
leader both self-respect and the respect of others. Third, the emphasis on learning
stresses the role of agency in human affairs, because the implied message is that what
is important is not so much what happens to a person but how the person frames what
happens to him or her and the lessons they can draw from their experiences (Avolio,
1999). A stress on agency is consistent with attaching significant importance to
leadership in human and social affairs. It also contains an optimistic message, which
is likely to increase the leader’s appeal to his or her audience. Fourth, the special
emphasis on learning from role models reinforces followership by presenting the
leader as someone who was, and sometimes still is, a follower, and by demonstrat-
ing the benefits of followership. Fifth, the story of development as learning enables
the leaders to communicate to the audience many specific messages they wish to
impart, either about the importance of values such as dedication, perseverance and
tenacity or about the importance of leadership behaviors such as setting a personal
example, admitting mistakes or leading in a democratic manner.

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Development as finding a cause

In the stories of political leaders, a theme could be identified that does not appear in
the stories of other leaders. These stories often present leadership development in
terms of developing identification with a movement and a cause and finding a sense
of direction through the development of a political or ideological outlook.
The story of leadership development as finding an ideology and identifying with
a movement is often associated with the story of a personal ordeal as representing a
collective ordeal. Both present the narrator as a prototypical member of the group
and thus increase the chances that he or she will be endorsed as a leader and followed
by other group members (van Knippenberg & Hogg, 2003). Thus in addition to pro-
moting the general value of devotion to an idea or a cause, the story also justifies the
leader’s position in the particular movement on the basis of his or her devotion to
the cause, and legitimizes the role of the leader as a representative symbol of the
movement. Furthermore, it contains an implicit call to followers to become similarly
devoted to the movement and the cause.
This theme and the implied lessons are not included in the stories of non-political
leaders. In contrast, the development stories of organizational leaders are more often
presented in terms of career progression. There are more elements of advancement,
fast promotion, early career appointments and upward mobility in these stories, and
more references to the developmental role that such appointments and successes
played in the leader’s development. The story of self-actualization included in these
organizational career narratives is a story of actualizing a personal potential, whereas
in the case of political leaders self-actualization is strongly linked to the achievement
of collective purposes.

Discussion
Limitations
Differences among the stories
In this article, we focused on common themes identified in two types of life stories:
interviews with young managers and written autobiographies of established leaders.
This does not mean there were no differences among the leaders whose life stories
we studied. The 26 life stories we have examined were told at various life and career
stages by different people under very different circumstances. Each story could be
read and interpreted taking into consideration the background of the narrator and the
particular circumstances in which it was told, as Erikson (1969), for instance, did in
his landmark study of Gandhi.

Other possible interpretations

Due to the interpretative nature of our analysis, it should be acknowledged that the
stories could be read using other lenses and perhaps leading to the identification of
important development themes overlooked by us. The most evident danger of story-
based research is the selective use of narratives or themes to amplify or reinforce the
researchers’ preconceived ideas or assumptions. Despite our effort to accurately rep-
resent the main common themes that appeared in leaders’ life stories, we cannot rule

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out the possibility that our choice of themes was influenced by our thesis that such
stories represent ‘experimenting with truth’ (to borrow Gandhi’s phrase) for the sake
of self-justification and self-presentation. In this regard, our analysis is also an experi-
ment with truth, the value of which cannot be fully assessed without further analysis
of the same and similar data.

Lack of a ‘control group’

Our study was exploratory in nature, and its results should be viewed as tentative. It
is possible that the themes of development identified by us are contained in the
development stories of other people and not just leaders. Therefore, to validate our
claim that leaders’ life stories are constructed to justify leadership, the autobio-
graphical stories of leaders should be compared to the autobiographical stories of
non-leaders (for example, writers, artists, scientists, or just ordinary people).

Conclusions and implications

Most previous research on leaders’ life stories has focused on attempts to discover
events and circumstances that contribute to the development of leadership traits and
skills. In recent years, some studies of leadership development acknowledge that it
is not the events themselves that generate development, but rather the combination
of the events, the individuals’ reactions to the events and the way they make meaning
out of both major and minor life experiences (Avolio & Gibbons, 1988). As recently
found by Bennis and Thomas (2002: 160–1), the meanings and interpretations of life
events are often organized into a life-story:
Whatever his or her generation, each of our leaders was the author, and critic, of
his or her own life. In the course of our interviews, it became clear that each
person has crafted a resonant story out of the important events and relationships
in his or her life. . . . Their stories explained, amused, engaged, and often
enrolled others in the narrator’s vision.
The full implications of such observations for the study of leadership have not yet
been spelled out. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a different, and complemen-
tary, perspective on leaders’ life stories. We suggest looking at them as stories that
reflect leaders’ self-concepts, values, traits and behaviors and thus as stories that
enable leaders to lead and exert influence on followers. We have tried to demonstrate
this approach with an analysis of leadership development themes in leaders’ life
stories. Our analysis highlighted four such themes or proto-stories: development as
a natural process, development out of coping with adverse circumstances, develop-
ment as self-improvement through learning, and development as finding a cause.
While the four themes are different in many respects, all of them provide poten-
tially strong justifications for the leader’s leadership and contain messages that might
influence followers or potential followers to follow the leader. We have relied on rela-
tively full life stories as presented in published autobiographies or lengthy interviews.
Admittedly, most followers or potential followers do not read biographies or have a
chance to listen to the leader’s life story in full. However, we can assume that many
followers are exposed to parts of the leader’s life story as they are told by the leader
or by others, and that such parts convey messages that might influence their identifi-

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Leadership Leading by Biography Shamir et al.

cation with the leader, trust in the leader, and readiness to be influenced by the leader.
Therefore, the construction of leaders’ life stories, their contents and their effects
should become more central topics in the study of leadership.

Suggestions for further research

Our aim in this study was to demonstrate the potential usefulness of a biographical
approach to the study of leadership. We believe this approach offers many other
research implications. From this perspective, leaders’ life stories can be approached
as ‘depositories of meaning’ (Gabriel, 2000: 15) and analysed to discover those
meanings. The data for such analysis can come from various sources: written biog-
raphies and autobiographies of leaders, interviews in the media, interviews conducted
for research purposes with leaders, colleagues and followers, and observations of
leaders’ public appearances and other occasions in which leaders share their life
stories with others. Depending on the focus of the inquiry, this data can be analysed
by using more formal methods of qualitative data analysis or by employing a more
interpretative approach.
Many lines of inquiry can be suggested from this perspective. Leaders’ life stories
can be compared to others’ life stories, for example artists, scientists, or just ordinary
people, to examine the proposition that they contain specific leadership related
contents, such as messages that are intended to posit the leader as a role model or
provide justification for his or her leadership position. Similarly, to test whether
leaders’ life stories are indeed selectively constructed by the leaders to serve certain
purposes, the life stories of leaders as told by themselves should be compared with
the stories that others – family members, colleagues, and followers – tell about the
same leaders’ lives. Such studies do not have to limit themselves to the formative
stages of the leaders’ lives and the themes of leadership development as we have
done. Other foci of comparison are possible, for instance, focusing on leaders’
accounts of their relationships with followers or the way they make decisions.
Life stories transmit not only individual but also social and cultural meanings
(Lieblich et al., 1998). This is because people construct their narratives from building
blocks available in their culture, and not only from their personal experiences, and
because the stories are communicated to others, and therefore assume a network of
meaning that is shared between the narrator and the audience. Therefore, by studying
leaders’ life stories, we can access cultural meanings of leadership and compare them
across contexts. Cultural differences in implicit leadership theories have been studied
using questionnaires about desirable leadership qualities given to samples in different
countries (e.g. The GLOBE project, House et al., 2004). An alternative, and perhaps
more natural and less obtrusive way of studying implicit leadership theories, would
be based on comparison of leaders’ life stories across cultures. Similar comparisons
could be employed to study historical developments in the meaning of leadership, as
well as differences in the meaning of leadership in various contexts (for example,
political, military, business).
A different line of inquiry would focus on the process of constructing life stories
by leaders. From a narrative perspective, leadership development is the development
of life stories, and therefore the construction of life stories is what leadership
development studies should focus on. This construction can be assumed to be an

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on-going process, which is performed not in isolation but in interaction with others,
and which is influenced by others’ responses to initial versions of the story. Certain
elements may be deleted or de-emphasized in successive versions of the story, while
others may be added or emphasized. Following different versions of the same
leaders’ life stories (for instance, in newspaper interviews given by the leader at
different periods) may provide some clues to this process.
The life-story perspective to leadership also suggests several lines of investigation
outside the narrative approach. Most importantly, followers’ responses to leaders’ life
stories and the effects of these stories on followers should be studied. There are
several possibilities in this regard. It may be possible to study what followers know
about their future leader’s life stories before they start interacting with the leader and
how this initial knowledge affects their expectations of the leader. It may also be
possible to compare distant and close followers of the same leaders to see if distant
followers, who are not exposed directly to the leaders’ behaviors, are more influenced
by what they know about the leader’s life story than direct followers who may be
more influenced by the leader’s behavioral style.
Specific propositions about the effects of different life-story contents on follow-
ers should also be tested. Leadership theories suggest many life-story elements that
can increase followers’ acceptance of the leader, identification with leader, trust in
the leader and obedience of the leader. For instance, we can test whether life stories
that emphasize the leader’s similarity with followers increase the followers’ percep-
tions of the leader’s prototypicality and their acceptance and endorsement of the
leader, or whether a story that highlights how the leader demonstrated courage and
overcame hardships increases followers’ trust in the leader’s ability.
Such tests can be carried out in field studies that examine the relationships
between what followers know of the leader’s life story and the relevant outcome vari-
ables. They can also be carried out experimentally. For instance, it is possible to
manipulate the contents of life stories by constructing different versions of fictitious
leaders’ biographies, presenting them to different samples and examining the effects
of each story on people’s reactions to the leader, such as identification with the leader
and willingness to trust the leader and obey him or her. Similarly, it is possible to
conduct laboratory experiments in which participants would be exposed to different
life stories of the experimental leaders to study the effects of different exposures, not
only on participants’ attitudes toward the leader, but on their performance as well. So
far, leadership experiments have examined the effects of different leadership styles
on followers’ attitudes and performance. These experiments should be complemented
by studies that examine the impact of leaders’ life-stories on the same variables.
Experimental studies should also test whether the source of the story moderates its
impact, namely whether the same stories have different effects when told by the
leaders themselves or by others.
More broadly, the biographical approach to the study of leadership may offer a
way to study leadership from an interdisciplinary perspective. For many decades, the
study of leadership in organizations has been dominated by a social-psychological
perspective. The vitalization of the leadership studies in the last two decades of the
20th century can be attributed in part to inputs from other disciplines. Thus House
(1977) developed his theory of charismatic leadership on the basis of reading the
political science and sociological literature, and Bass (1985) imported Burns’(1978)

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theory of transformational leadership from the fields of history and political science
to the field of organization studies.
The study of biographies and autobiographies has informed the disciplines of
history, political science, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and literature. There-
fore, there is a rich potential in a narrative approach to the study of leadership for
cross-fertilization among the disciplines. For instance, while this essay focuses on
the contents of leaders’ life stories, the structure and form of the stories may also be
of consequence and influence the nature of followers’ emotional reactions, their
identification with the narrator, and the extent to which the story stays in their
memory. The theoretical concepts and analytic tools required to study these aspects
of leaders’ life stories could be borrowed from studies of biographies and autobi-
ographies as literary forms, as well as from fields of drama and film studies.
We conclude by quoting Kellerman and Webster (2001: 490) who recently stated:
‘How useful are life histories to students of leadership? To us the answer is clear:
Very’.

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Boas Shamir is Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, The

Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He holds a PhD in social psychology from the
London School of Economics and Political Science.

Hava Dayan-Horesh is Associate Director of the Western Galilee College, Israel.

She holds a PhD in sociology from the National University of Singapore. At the time
the study was carried out she was an MA student at the Department of Sociology and
Anthropology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Dalya Adler was an MA student at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology,

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

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