Leadership and Followership and Why It Matters
According to the 2024 Gallup State of the Global Workplace report, only 32% of employees worldwide are actively engaged in their roles. A primary driver of this persistent disengagement is a fundamental misunderstanding. Leadership and followership are often viewed as separate, hierarchical roles. In reality, they are interdependent components of high-performing teams. For decades, organizational development discourse has prioritized leadership training in isolation, failing to recognize that effective leadership cannot exist without intentional, empowered followership. This article explores the formal definitions of leadership and followership. It examines their reciprocal relationship. It also explains how aligning them can drive sustainable long-term organizational success.
What is Leadership and Followership
Contrary to popular perception, leadership is not defined by a job title or formal authority. The Society for Industrial-Organizational Psychology (SIOP) defines leadership as the process of influencing a group of people to collaborate toward a shared goal, rather than directing compliance. Effective leaders do not dictate outcomes; they create clarity, remove operational barriers, and enable their teams to contribute their unique expertise to collective success.
Followership, meanwhile, is often misrepresented as passive obedience. Leading followership scholar Barbara Kellerman defines followership as the voluntary commitment to a shared goal. In this view, followers actively contribute their insights, feedback, and effort. They do more than simply execute assigned tasks. This distinction is critical: compliant followership may deliver short-term results, but empowered followership drives long-term innovation and organizational resilience.
The Relationship Between Leaders and Followers
At its core, the relationship between leaders and followers is a reciprocal social contract grounded in mutual trust and accountability. This framework is formalized in Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) theory, a well-established organizational behavior model that posits high-performing teams emerge when leaders and followers engage in two-way, respectful interactions rather than one-way directives. Under this model, leaders do not treat all followers uniformly. Instead, they invest in collaborative relationships. In these relationships, followers feel empowered to share candid feedback. At the same time, leaders feel confident delegating meaningful ownership of work.
A 2023 Harvard Business Review (HBR) study found that teams operating under strong LMX dynamics had 41% lower turnover rates and 35% higher task completion rates than teams with rigid, hierarchical leadership structures. This is because the relationship is not based on status, but on shared investment in collective success. When this contract is upheld, both leaders and followers prioritize the team’s goals over individual recognition.
Why Leadership and Followership Need Each Other
The interdependence of these two roles is not just a theoretical concept; it is a practical driver of measurable organizational outcomes. Below are seven core reasons this partnership is critical:
1. To Mitigate Blind Spots
No single leader can have full visibility into all aspects of a project or operation. Followers on the front lines often hold critical, on-the-ground insights that leaders may miss due to their distance from daily workflows. A 2022 McKinsey & Company study found that 60% of successful process improvements originated from frontline employee feedback, rather than executive mandates. For example, a team of warehouse associates at a major e-commerce retailer identified a simple adjustment to package sorting. This change reduced order fulfillment time by 12%. It would have gone unnoticed if leaders had not actively solicited their input.
2. To Drive Shared Accountability
Accountability cannot be enforced exclusively from the top down. When followers are empowered to hold leaders accountable for clear communication, consistent support, and transparent decision-making, accountability becomes balanced. Leaders, in turn, hold followers accountable for delivering on committed outcomes. As a result, the team avoids a toxic “blame culture.” This helps preserve trust over time. According to SHRM’s 2023 guidelines for building team accountability, teams with shared accountability have 28% lower rates of missed deadlines than teams with top-down accountability structures.
3. To Boost Psychological Safety
Psychological safety, defined by Google’s Project Aristotle as the belief that team members will not be punished for speaking up with ideas, questions, or mistakes, is the top predictor of high-performing teams. This safety cannot be created by leaders alone. Followers must contribute candid and respectful feedback. Leaders must also model vulnerability by acknowledging their own gaps and mistakes. A 2024 Google People Operations report found that teams with strong psychological safety had 50% higher rates of innovative problem-solving than teams with low psychological safety.
4. To Accelerate Decision-Making
When leaders involve trusted followers in decision-making, the process becomes more efficient. Time spent on redundant analysis is reduced. Costly missteps caused by limited perspective are also avoided. A 2024 Gartner study found that teams with collaborative decision-making processes cut decision cycle times by 27% compared to teams with top-down decision-making structures. For example, a fintech startup reduced the time to launch a new feature from 12 weeks to 7 weeks. This improvement came from including frontline customer success representatives in the final approval process. They were able to flag unforeseen user experience gaps before launch.
5. To Improve Employee Retention and Engagement
Gallup data shows that employees who feel their input is valued by their leaders are 5.6 times more likely to be engaged. They are also 87% less likely to leave their roles within a year. This is because empowered followership gives employees a sense of purpose and ownership over their work. It prevents them from feeling like interchangeable cogs in a system. For example, a global marketing agency reduced voluntary turnover by 32% after implementing a formal process for followers to contribute to team strategy meetings.
6. To Support Adaptive Change
In fast-moving markets, organizations cannot rely on static leadership directives to navigate disruptive change. Followers often have on-the-ground insights into how change will impact daily operations. Their input is critical to designing sustainable change management strategies. The 2024 Prosci Best Practices in Change Management report found that projects with active follower involvement had a 73% success rate, compared to just 23% for projects with no follower input.
7. To Sustain Long-Term Team Performance
Short-term wins can be achieved through top-down directives, but long-term sustained performance requires ongoing collaboration between leaders and followers. A 2023 Stanford Graduate School of Business study found that teams with balanced leader-follower dynamics had 2x higher revenue growth over a 5-year period than teams with hierarchical leadership structures. This is because collaborative teams are better able to adapt to changing market conditions. They can also retain the top talent needed to drive consistent growth.
When Leaders Also Need to Follow
Leadership is not a permanent or universal role. Even the most senior leaders must act as followers when engaging with subject matter experts, frontline teams, or cross-functional partners. Effective leaders recognize that they do not have exclusive access to the best ideas, and they prioritize listening over directing in these contexts.
For example, when Amazon was developing its Prime Video service in 2011, senior executives intentionally followed the lead of frontline content moderators and user experience designers. These team members provided critical insights into how to reduce user frustration with content navigation. This approach helped Prime Video become one of the leading streaming platforms globally, with over 200 million paid subscribers as of 2025. As outlined in this HBR guide to humble leadership, leaders who prioritize listening to their teams are better able to adapt to changing market conditions and avoid costly strategic missteps.
When Followers Show Leadership
Empowered followership often includes acts of upward leadership. In these acts, followers take initiative to address gaps, propose solutions, or support their peers without formal authority. This type of adaptive followership is critical to organizational resilience, as it allows teams to address challenges quickly without waiting for top-down approval.
For example, a junior supply chain analyst at a global retail brand noticed a costly issue. The company was incurring unnecessary shipping costs by using a single carrier for all regional shipments. Instead of ignoring the issue, the analyst researched alternative carriers, compiled a detailed cost-benefit analysis, and presented it to their leadership team. The company adopted the recommendation, reducing annual shipping costs by 18% and saving over $2.3 million annually. A 2023 study by the Center for Creative Leadership found that teams with high levels of upward leadership were 30% more likely to recover quickly from unexpected disruptions, such as supply chain delays or sudden market shifts.
Why This Balance Matters for Long-Term Success
The balance between leadership and followership is not just a matter of daily team performance. It is also a critical driver of long-term organizational sustainability. CB Insights’ 2024 analysis of 1,000 failed startups found that 60% of failures were attributed to team-related issues, most commonly a breakdown in the leader-follower relationship where founders prioritized top-down control over collaborative input.
In contrast, organizations that prioritize balanced leader-follower dynamics are better able to attract and retain top talent. They can also drive innovation and adapt to market changes. Patagonia, consistently ranked as one of the best places to work in the U.S., has built its culture around shared leadership. Frontline retail employees have the authority to approve customer returns or propose sustainability initiatives without manager approval. This culture has helped Patagonia achieve consistent revenue growth for over 40 years, despite operating in a highly competitive retail market.
Conclusion
Leadership and followership are not opposing roles. They are two sides of the same coin, dependent on each other to drive high-performing, sustainable teams. Too often, organizational development efforts focus exclusively on leadership training, failing to recognize that empowered followership is equally critical to success.
To strengthen this relationship, leaders must prioritize listening, transparency, and shared accountability. Followers, in turn, must prioritize active engagement, candid feedback, and adaptive initiative. By framing the relationship as a reciprocal partnership rather than a hierarchical structure, organizations can improve employee engagement, reduce turnover, and drive long-term sustainable growth.
The first step to building this balance is simple. For leaders, ask one team member this week, “What insight do you have that I may be missing?” For followers, share one specific, actionable idea to improve a current process in your next team meeting. These small, intentional actions can lay the foundation for a stronger, more collaborative leader-follower relationship that delivers lasting results.
