A Tale of an Emotional Leader, His Fellows and Millions of Stakeholders

Abstract

This paper is built on a leadership journey of a popular leader who was involved to change the social and economic life of unprivileged community people of developing world. It discourses the starting, picking-up, paradigm shifting, falling-down of the leader and the consequences of failure. The paper discusses different theoretical perspectives of emotional leadership and shows how un-assessed and un-controlled emotions override strategies critical to achieve the leadership goals. It shows how overwhelming emotions of leader with power and unearned resources can be detrimental to leader, follower groups and other stakeholders. Building upon the case discussed, it offers a number of theoretical propositions for leadership knowledge domain and indicative learning points for practitioners.