A New Paradigm of Leaders and Leadership in Political Parties

This book is the second volume of an extensive work of research whose overall aim is to examine the relationships between the development of leadership functions and characteristics in a new framework of Party Leadership Paradigm (PLP) and its effects on the party achievements in light of party strategic management concept and process. Leadership theories, political parties, strategic management concepts, resource based views and core competencies in a political party are studied in detail. In this paradigm leaders are those with good levels of change competence (ability 'to do') and competency ('having' characteristics and capability) linked into party activities at the four levels of meta, macro, middle and micro leadership. Leadership functional approach is discussed and it is concluded that the competitive advantage of a political party directly depends on the design of a party’s organisational system (POS), which is activity system and value adding; party's resources and value propositioning often raising the barrier to competitors. These are and result from the interaction of PLP and POS components. A spiral model of STEPLESS to show party strategy design also is proposed.