Perhaps the first researcher to formally recognize the importance of the leader, follower, and situation in the leadership Fiedler used these three components to develop his contingency model of leadership, a theory of leadership that will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 13. Although we recognize Fiedler's contributions, we owe per haps even more to Hollander's transactional approach to leadership. call our approach the interactional framework. Several aspects of this derivative of Hollander's approach are worthy of additional comment. First, as shown in Figure 12, the framework depicts leadership as a function of three elements-the leader, the follow- ers, and the situation. Second, a particular leadership scenario can be examined using each level of analysis separately Although this is a useful way to understand the leadership process, we can understand the process even better if we also examine the interactions among the three elements, or lenses, represented by the overlapping areas in the figure. For example, we can better understand the leadership process if we not only look at the leaders and the followers but also examine how leaders and followers af- fect each other in the leadership process. Similarly, we can examine the leader and the situation separately, but we can gain even further under- standing of the leadership process by looking at how the situation can constrain or facilitate a leader's actions and how the leader can change different aspects of the situation to be more effective. Thus a final impor- tant aspect of the framework is that leadership is the result of a complex set of interactions among the leader, the followers, and the situation. These complex interactions may be why broad generalizations about leadership are problematic: many factors influence the leadership process(see Highlight 1.3 on page 11)