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In established organizations, leadership involves followers and leaders. Leader roles are primarily assumed and assigned by and to older organizational members, i.e., baby boomers. Follower roles are populated with members of all generations. As baby boomers attrite and retire, Gen-Xers move into organizational leadership roles. Demographers tell us the Gen-Xers will be replaced by the Gen-Y. Each generation is thought to possess unique characteristics that impact performance in the workplace, positively and negatively. Proactive management is required to meld the inter-generational workforce into a cohesive, performing unit. This paper reports on research studying differences in commitment across the follower component of leadership in the transportation industry. The paper concludes with organizational strategies for managing the inter-generational workforce within the organization as each generation transitions into leadership roles.

This paper describes research into the relationship of emotional intelligence, emotion regulation, and follower behaviors. The research is part of an ongoing initiative to recognize and understand followers in the transportation and service industries. Behavioral complexities such as emotions are paramount in the intricacies of management and leadership and are widely studied. Emotional intelligence has become a standard concept in business settings while its predictive powers relative to personnel performance forecasting abilities are still being researched. An ability to interact with a diverse employee population, a complex environment, and multifaceted decision requirements would seemingly require leaders and followers to have a fully developed emotional presence. This presence is necessary for workers at all levels to be able to accommodate unpredictability, demonstrate adaptability, and perform flexibly within the workplace.

This paper compares the follower profiles of transportation industry personnel with other industry groups, principally engineers and DOD personnel. In compiling the comparison, Chaleff’s courageous follower behaviors are used to identify the profiles and identify similarities and diversities. In addition, the paper reports on comparative analysis for follower behaviors, locus of control and the Big Five personality factors from a pilot study.

For every leader there are many non-leaders-followers-who benefit the organization's competitive position. While leaders seem to dominate management research, management thinking, and management practice, in reality, followers permeate all organizations and make them effective. While the many are ignored, the few receive attention. Chaleff has developed a model describing key behaviors of effective followers in an organizational setting. This paper describes refinement of a survey instrument developed to assess Chaleff's model as a measuring tool for the follower behaviors within organizations. The results indicate that the instrument, The Follower Profile, is robust across populations in discriminating follower behaviors. The paper also recommends some innovative leadership development implications and concludes by introducing a new paradigm for thinking about the leadership process.