According to several studies, workers don't trust their leaders while the Conference Board finds job satisfaction at a low ebb, and even many companies themselves give their own leadership development efforts low marks. These struggles have produced a truckload full of books and commentary. “Unfortunately, these materials are often disconnected from organizational reality and, as a consequence, useless for sparking improvement,” he writes, wondering if that is one of the reasons “resources invested in leadership  development have produced so few results”. Estimates of the amount spent on it range from 14 billion to 50 billion dollars a year in the United States alone.

Sadly, he feels, that thinking on leadership has become a sort of morality tale. There are writers who advocate ethics on one hand and on the other are empirical researchers, who report evidence on the positive effects of such as narcissism, self-promotion, rule breaking or lying. The discrepancies stem from the human tendency to confuse what people believe ought to b-e true with what actually is, says Pfeffer. This moral framing of leadership oversimplifies the complexity of an executive's task since in reality some of the most successful and admired leaders – for example, Nelson Mandela, Abraham Lincoln, and John F. Kennedy – were above all pragmatists, willing to do the necessary to achieve their objectives.
Finally, the division of leaders and their actions into good and bad seriously oversimplifies a much more complex reality, says Pfeffer. “When individuals are promoted to management, their perspectives change and so too does their behaviour.” McKinsey research also suggests that the effectiveness of various types of leadership behaviour varies with the health of the organization in which they are practised.

The focus on leadership should therefore be about useful behaviour rather than overly simplistic, and therefore fundamentally inaccurate, categorizations of people and personalities, says the Stanford professor.
He suggests: work diligently to create resources that are useful to others and assiduously build relationships, even with enemies. Master the science of influencing others. Embrace ambiguity to achieve your goals and do not forget Steve Jobs. He demonstrated that leadership is not about winning popularity contests or being the most beloved person in a social organization. Innovating often disturb the status quo and vested interests.
The most important message is that leadership, the capacity to get things done, is a skill that can be improved like any other, from playing a musical instrument or speaking a foreign language to mastering a sport, says Pfeffer. Great leaders learned “how to weigh what trade-offs they were willing to make and, more important, to size up the circumstances required to achieve their bold objectives.”

Find full report here:
Getting beyond the BS of leadership literature