Generational Differences in Leadership and Followership Styles: Insights from Pop Culture

This chapter examines generational differences in leadership and followership through cinema, treating popular culture as a meaningful site of leadership sense-making rather than as an illustrative background. Drawing on generational research and established followership theories, the chapter analyzes how cinematic narratives portray authority, collaboration, resistance, and voice across Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennials, and Generation Z. Selected films are used as cultural case studies to explore how leadership and followership are shaped by distinct social, political, and economic contexts. Foregrounding followership as an active and relational practice, the chapter demonstrates how films dramatize diverse follower orientations – including loyalty, skepticism, participation, and activism – and how these orientations influence leadership processes across generations. By integrating followership frameworks with generational analysis, the chapter conceptualizes leadership and followership as mutually constituted practices embedded in cultural meaning systems, rather than as fixed roles within formal hierarchies. The chapter contributes to intergenerational leadership and followership scholarship by extending predominantly organizational and demographic approaches to include cultural–interpretive analysis. In keeping with the applied orientation of the series, it also offers leadership educators and practitioners a structured framework for using film as a pedagogical resource to examine intergenerational dynamics, surface assumptions about authority and agency, and support dialog in multigenerational organizational, educational, and civic contexts.