Through the years, our view of what leadership is and who can exercise it has changed considerably. Leadership competencies hav

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问题     Through the years,  our view of what leadership is and who can exercise it has changed considerably. Leadership competencies have remained constant, but our understanding of what it is, how it works, and the ways in which people learn to apply it has shifted. We do have the beginnings of a general theory of leadership, from history and social research and above all from the thoughts of reflective practitioners such as Moses, Julius Caesar, and James Madison, and in our own time from such disparate sources of wisdom as Gandhi, Winston Churchill, Mao Tse-tung, and Henry Kissinger, who have very little in common except that they have not only been there but tried with some fairness to speculate on paper about it.
    But tales and reflective observation are not enough except to convince us that leaders are physically strong and abnormally hard workers. Today we are a little closer to understanding how and who people lead, but it wasn’t easy getting there. Decades of academic analysis have given us more than 350 definitions of leadership. Literally thousands of empirical investigations of leaders have been conducted in the last seventy-five years alone,  but no clear understanding exists as to what distinguishes leaders from non-leaders,  and perhaps more important, what distinguishes effective leaders from ineffective leaders and effective organizations from ineffective organizations.
    Never have so many labored so long to say so little. Multiple interpretations of leadership exist, each providing a fragment of insight but each remaining an incomplete and wholly inadequate explanation. Most of these definitions don’t agree with each other, and many of them would seem quite remote to the leaders whose skills are being examined. Definitions reflect fashions, political tides and academic trends. They don’t always reflect reality and sometimes they just represent nonsense. It’s as if what Braque once said about art is also true of leadership: "The only thing that matters in art is the part that cannot be explained. "
    Many theories of leadership have come and gone. Some looked at the leader. Some looked at the situation. None has stood the test of time.  With such a track record, it is understandable why leadership research and theory have been so frustrating as to deserve the label "the La Brea Tar Pits" of organizational inquiry.  Located in Los Angeles, these asphalt pits house the remains of a long sequence of prehistoric animals that came to investigate but never left the area.
The author thinks that ______.

选项 A、many people have labored to be leaders
B、leaders are beyond our understanding
C、the essence of leadership has not been grasped
D、the definitions of leadership should vary

答案C

解析 第三段第二句起作者说:对领导艺术的解释是多种多样的,而每一种都是片面的、不完整的和不充分的。这些定义大部分相互矛盾,而且很多都没有研究领袖的领导技巧。这些定义反映了当时的政治潮流和学术趋向。它们不能反映实际情况,有时一点用都没有。
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