Followership

Abstract Followership is defined as the beliefs, characteristics, and behaviors that followers bring to the leadership relationship and how they affect leadership and organizational outcomes. Research on followership has evolved from treating followers as an ineffectual and obedient mass, to investigating how followers contribute to the leadership process. This article on followership explores both research‐and practitioner‐based models of followership and considers the ways in which followership research has changed over the past two decades. Given that followership is a fairly new area of research within leadership, we also explore how both research and practice can continue to add to our definition and understanding of followership.