“Corporate Political Action (CPA) in Africa”
1. Title:
Leadership as engagement and as a system development
Article Information:
Bill Buenar Puplampu, Leadership as engagement, leadership as system development; A contextualized Ghanaian, European Business Review, 2010, 22(6).
The article primarily outlines a leadership framework that seeks to put in focus a local perspective of leadership engagement in facilitating a systems development in the Ghanaian setting. It is the opinion of the author that, leadership in organizations in developing countries like Ghana is mostly not associated with the organization’s failure to develop corporate systems or fear of political powers amongst others. More so, of particular interest are the political dimensions of corporate leadership where the local political forces present a realistic challenge that corporate leaders in Ghana have to deal with in many cases. The article centres on a rather unusual but thorough analysis of various corporate leadership literatures presenting a strong theoretical and empirical view of the subject matter. It initially presents the leadership growth theory and further discusses the gaps and the contextualization of arguments and then the African conundrum as well as the state of leadership research in Ghana and Africa as a whole.
The author adopts an exploratory design using data about the challenges and difficulties faced by organizations and their leaders to make sense of corporate leadership in the context of a developing country. It first involved a series of three studies conceived from an interventionist standpoint. The initial study utilized data from applied diagnostic interventions; the second used qualitative interviews and the last involved an open-ended questionnaire. Data was mainly collected from 25 Ghanaian organizations and 29 corporate executives. The author tends to support a bold departure of rigorous and seemingly one-dimensional approach to addressing...