Business and employee management are key subjects in business administration. For decades, actually for centuries, there has been a discussion about how effective leadership of people or employees can be realized. It has always been a major concern within market-based economic systems to learn how its products and services should be designed in order to generate consumer demand. That the discussion about business and employee management is more relevant than ever is linked to the fact that leadership situations are influenced by a variety of external factors. They include, in particular, political, cultural, social, demographic, economic, and technological developments. It is therefore required for business and employee management to be adapted to those external framework conditions on a permanent basis.
In former times, the assumption in mainstream leadership research was that leadership success relied on specific personal characteristics. Later on, the prevailing view was that the decisive factors in employee management lied in specific leadership behavior or leadership styles. Today's research on leadership is dominated by situation-oriented approaches, providing for specific leadership concepts for specific organizational and employee-related structures.
The present thesis is an attempt to bundle a variety of approaches to leadership with the aim of providing an overarching framework for concepts of a similar nature. Therefore, the leadership concept to be developed in what follows is to be characterized by the principles of holism and sustainability.
The first step is to present the fundamentals of leadership and management in order to introduce key terms and concepts and provide an overview of the research on leadership.
Chapter 3 deals with separately displaying the business and employee management approaches of various management pioneers, distinguishing between early and con-temporary pioneers. Each approach is presented in consideration of its key elements, its strengths and opportunities, as well as its weaknesses and limitations.
The fourth chapter, finally, is devoted to developing a holistic and sustainable leader-ship concept.