In his 1996 article, ‘Leaders who make a difference’, organizational psychologist and leadership consultant Manfred Kets de Vries sprung to leadership's defence:

Reading his impassioned plea for leadership in 2020 is a strange experience. The extensive promotion of leadership by scholars and practitioners in the last two decades has since lifted leadership to a sacred status. Leadership is now more widely assumed as a vital force for good and commonly regarded as a panacea for all manner of organizational and societal problems. Ket de Vries’ evocative words tapped into a neoliberal yearning for hyperagency. He encourages the reader to imagine ourselves as King Henry V commanding our army at the Battle of Agincourt. The hypnotic repetition about our power to effect ‘strategic transformation and change’ and ‘transform strategic constraints’ in our ‘vital role as catalysts of change’ lulls us into the seductive belief that we can and we will single-handedly change the world.

Within this romance with leadership is a love song to white masculinity. The early formation of leadership studies took shape around the values of the European Enlightenment, which instated rigid gendered and racial hierarchies. At the centre of leadership stood the figure of the autonomous European man from whom leadership gloriously emanated. He represented ‘orderliness, rationality and self-control’ while the Others he colonized and enslaved represented ‘chaos, irrationality, violence and the breakdown of self-regulation’.