Leadership on Request Constructing Milton Hershey's Leader Identity

We know little about the nuances of how followers enact their reciprocal roles in influencing leaders’ socially constructed identities. Towards this aim, Blom and Alvesson (2013) advanced the metaphor of ‘Leadership on Demand’ to describe how followers within a shared leadership-structure schema may initiate or inhibit leadership by accepting or rejecting a leader's identity claim. However, Leadership on Demand may be unrealistic when the proactive participation of followers is constrained by the leadership context. We argue that in leadership settings that demand hierarchical leadership-structure schemas in which the granting of leader identity and claiming of follower identity are essentially obligatory, followers may still purposefully shape a leader's socially constructed identity. We propose the idiom of ‘Leadership on Request’ and apply this perspective to interpret the historical case of the Gilded Age paternalist Milton S. Hershey.