Journal of Leadership and Management 2 (2014) 3-7 ISSN: 2391-6087 CJ Rhoads Department of Business Administration, College of Business, Kutztown University, USA Leadership summarized Major points of research 1. Introduction Over the course of a decade, the author of this article devoted a great deal of time to read the research on lead- ership in a personal quest to become a better leader. his article starts with a very brief narrative summary on the history of leadership along with many of the major points on which leadership research was focused. he article in- ishes with a comprehensive table on all the major research- ers and gurus who have published well-known works on the topic of leadership. 2. Leadership research development Initial research on leadership focused on styles of leadership. Lewin, Lippit, White (1939) appeared early on in the leadership research literature. They identified three styles of leadership based upon the characteristics of the leader-follower relationship. We had the author- itarian, democratic, or laissez-fair leader. The research showed that the most productive teams were run by democratic or participative leaders, though autocratic was the most common type found of people in leader- ship positions. Many other researchers built upon this basic founda- tion and developed more complex and comprehensive theories and studies. Likert (1967) identiied four styles, and Shartle (1956) developed the Leader Behavior De- scription Questionnaire – funded by the government and used mainly to assess the leadership capabilities of the military, which morphed over the years into the MLQ, the MultiFactor Leadership Questionnaire. his framework spawned four decades of research dominated by Bernard Bass (1960, 1993, 2003), Ralph Stogdill (1948, 1963, 1972, 1974), and Bruce Avolio (1999, 2001, 2009)who focused again on the speciic personality traits of people to deter- mine their ability to lead. his spurred even more lead- ership studies with people like William Gardner (1998), Fred Walumbwa (2008, 2008), and Warren Bennis (1990) focusing on Transactional Leadership, Authentic leader- ship; Transformational Leadership and Charismatic Lead- ership, Visionary Leadership, and any other type of leader- ship you might want to name. One of the problems with paper and pencil assessment is their historical basis; many came out of the leadership research which was validated only with men, the think- ing at the time being that only men could ever be consid- 2014 Published by Institute of Leadership in Management Inc. Abstract Over the course of a decade, the author of this article devoted a great deal of time to read the research on leadership in a personal quest to become a better leader. his article starts with a very brief narrative summary on the history of leadership along with many of the major points on which leadership research was focused. he article inishes with a comprehensive table on all the major researchers and gurus who have published well-known works on the topic of leadership. Keywords: leadership, research summary of leadership, leadership guru, leadership researcher, better leader, management versus leadership, leadership review Correspondence address: CJ Rhoads, D.Ed., M.Ed. Professor of Business Department of Business Administration, College of Business, Kutztown University, Kutztown, Pennsylvania, USA email: rhoads@kutztown.edu Article info: Available online: 23 December 2014 Editor: Adam Szpaderski Journal information: 2014 Published by Institute of Leadership in Management Inc. Journal homepage: www.leadership.net.pl