All at sea with leadership styles : Control and command or engage people skills?

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to understand the role of interaction in the process of leadership. Interaction has been claimed to be a leadership competence in the Royal Navy. The aim of this research is to define how interaction works within naval teams. Design/methodology/approach The research uses grounded theory. Following a series of leadership discussions in separate focus groups, discussion topics were coded and subjected to recursive qualitative analysis. The grounded approach is used to synthesize and develop existing leadership theory strands, as well as to extend the trait-process approach to leadership. Findings The research discovers the key interaction behaviors of engagement, disengagement and levelling. The findings support recent developments in follower-centric perceptions and in interaction specifically. The authors develop engagement theory by combining it with the less well-researched area of leadership resistance. The authors then re-frame resistance as social levelling, a more comprehensive interaction mechanism. Originality/value This research uniquely uses grounded theory to extend current theories (competence-based leadership and trait-process theories of leadership), explaining the complexity of leadership interaction. The research also synthesizes and develops engagement and levelling (resistance to leadership) theories for the first time. As such, the project suggests a full range model of follower response to leadership, including subtle forms of resistance to power. The value of group-level analysis using focus groups is recommended, especially for other collective leader–follower approaches to leadership. The research is of interest to those studying leadership process theories, competencies, leader-follower traditions, engagement and power/resistance research.