Leadership in military units and business 15 Leadership in military combat units and business organizations A comparative psychological analysis Micha Popper Department of Psychology, Haifa University, Haifa, Israel Leadership is one of the most common and least understood phenomena in the world. Thus Burns[1] begins his book on leadership. However, despite the lack of clarity from the research point of view, there seems to be agreement and understanding with regard to the nature of leadership in practice, at least on the intuitive level. As defined by Kotter[2], a well-known researcher on the subject, leadership is “getting people to act without coercion”. Similar definitions have been offered by the most prominent writers on leadership[3,4], According to this view, as Mintzberg[5] points out, the manager (like the military commander) does many things: co-ordination, logistics, management of information, of budgets and so forth. One of their roles is leadership: motivating people to perform tasks to the best of their ability. Based on the definition by Kotter and the prominent researchers of leadership, I will attempt in this article to characterize leadership patterns and classify them, according to differential organizational psychology contexts, along a continuum of leadership behaviour. The analysis and discussion will focus more on military leadership because (as will be explained in the body of the article) on the suggested continuum military leadership constitutes a very clear and prominent reference point for comparative analysis of types of leadership in organizations. The distinct character of military leadership in combat units was clearly demonstrated by Gabriel and Savage[6], who dealt with the leadership crisis among US army officers in Vietnam. They compared military leaders with managers in the civilian business sector and their main argument was that the combat officers in Vietnam were overly influenced by the business management ethos. In fact, they behaved as “battle managers” but were not able to “provide the required military leadership”. The comparative analysis of those researchers was done in structural functional terms. T he present article aims to analyse the social psychological meaning and the dynamics underlying military leadership in comparison with leadership in civilian organizations, particularly business ones, which represent the other end of the same continuum. The starting point for this discussion is the description of leadership as an interpersonal process, following an approach that views leadership as a central phenomenon in the social psychology of groups and organizations[7]. This Journal of Managerial Psychology, Vol. 11 No. 1, 1996, pp. 15-23. © MCB University Press, 0268-3946