THE CONCEPT OF LEADERSHIP AS A MENTAL PROTOTYPE

Abstract

With the participation of students from the School of Industrial Relations of the Andrés Bello Catholic University, Guayana nucleus, an investigation was planned and carried out to examine the concept that people form about leadership. The project began as an exploratory investigation in which the open interview was used to acquire information. The results of the interviews allowed the identification of two types of concepts about leadership: the executor and the consultant. Two hypotheses emerged from the results of these interviews:

1 the distribution of the leadership concept is normally distributed and 2 the notions of the executing leader and the consulting leader are associated with the categories of demographic variables: geographic area, sex, age and education. Evidence supporting the first hypothesis was found and evidence in favor of the second hypothesis was found in the variables of age and education. The article concludes with the application of the
results to interpret recent social events.

Keywords: Leadership, mental prototype.