In my first essay, Why Was Followership Never Taught?, I looked to traditional Chinese households to understand why followership, despite being an ancient and essential human practice, was rarely recognized as an independent field of study. Those households had clear hierarchies, developmental pathways, mentoring relationships, and standards of excellence within followership. They also demonstrated that leadership could exist within followership because a person could simultaneously follow someone above while leading others below.
In my second essay, A Scholar-Practitioner's Dilemma: When Even the Word "Followership" Carries Social Meaning, I moved from historical structure to contemporary identity. I reflected on the difference between the academic meaning of followership and the social meaning people may attach to the word. Although scholars recognize followers as active contributors, courageous partners, and critical thinkers, many people still associate followership with lower status or with a temporary stage that should eventually be left behind.
Together, these two reflections left me with a new question. If followership is shaped by both organizational structure and social meaning, might it also be understood and expressed differently across organizational settings? More specifically, what might we learn by comparing followership in corporate and civic organizations?
As I continue developing my understanding of followership, this question has become personally meaningful. My own experience spans both for-profit businesses, the political arena, and non-profit civic organizations. In each setting, I have observed people grow, exercise influence, develop expertise, assume greater responsibility, and move between leadership and followership roles, yet the structures supporting those processes are not always the same.
This third essay is therefore an effort to clarify my own thinking. It does not suggest that corporations are purely hierarchical or that civic organizations are completely flat. Instead, it asks how different sources of authority, conditions of participation, and pathways of development may shape the experience and expression of followership.
More Than One Path of Development
A thoughtful response to my first essay helped move this inquiry forward. John Dallas, a followership expert and longtime technology professional, observed that many technical specialists "have no interest in moving up the traditional hierarchy," even though they want to continue developing their expertise and have a clear career path. He explained that some technology organizations have created technical career paths that parallel traditional management tracks, allowing specialists to deepen their knowledge, integrate new skills, mentor others, and create increasing value without assuming responsibility for managing staff.
His observation challenged a common assumption embedded in discussions of development. Growth does not always mean becoming a manager, and influence does not always require formal authority. A person may advance vertically through management, professionally through expertise, or relationally through the trust and influence developed among colleagues.
This distinction also connects with the traditional household examined in my first essay. The chief steward did not become the head of the family, but that did not mean the steward lacked a developmental path, authority, or professional standing. Excellence was demonstrated through competence, judgment, stewardship, institutional knowledge, and the trust required to guide others.
Modern technical career paths are obviously not equivalent to the fixed social classes of traditional households. Nevertheless, both examples remind us that meaningful development can occur without requiring every capable contributor to pursue the highest managerial position. They invite us to understand followership not as stagnation, but as a role within which expertise, responsibility, influence, and leadership can continue to develop.
Corporate Followership Is Also Relational
Any comparison between corporate and civic organizations must acknowledge that contemporary corporate followership is not simply positional or transactional. Followership scholars increasingly describe leadership and followership as relational, developmental, and mutually influential processes. Employees do not merely receive instructions from people above them; they interpret, question, advise, collaborate, contribute expertise, and influence organizational decisions.
Many corporations intentionally create conditions that support these relationships. Mentoring programs, cross-functional teams, employee resource groups, collaborative problem-solving, technical career ladders, and leadership-development opportunities can all expand the ways employees contribute and grow. In healthy organizational environments, followers may exercise voice, challenge ideas constructively, and participate in shared leadership without holding the highest formal title.
Corporate hierarchy therefore does not prevent relational followership. Formal structure and relational influence coexist. A manager may have positional authority while depending heavily on the knowledge, judgment, and cooperation of employees who possess greater technical expertise or closer contact with customers, operations, or emerging problems.
At the same time, these relationships usually operate within an employment structure. Reporting lines, job descriptions, performance evaluations, compensation, promotion systems, and organizational policies establish formal expectations. Employees may exercise substantial voice, but their participation still occurs within a system in which authority and economic dependence have practical consequences.
A Different Playbook in Political Organizations
My experience in congressional settings introduced another organizational context that does not fit neatly into either the corporate or civic model. A congressional office has a formal staff hierarchy, but it also operates within a political and electoral system. Professional responsibilities, political trust, public accountability, constituent relationships, and electoral legitimacy interact in ways that distinguish it from both businesses and nonprofit civic organizations.
Congressional staff members are generally hired into specialized roles such as constituent services, communications, legislative policy, community engagement, scheduling, or political advising. Movement between these functions can occur, but it is not always a predictable progression. A highly effective caseworker may develop deep knowledge of constituent needs without automatically advancing into a legislative or political-advisory role.
More importantly, the elected official’s position does not sit at the top of an internal staff promotion ladder. A staff member cannot be promoted into becoming a Member of Congress. To pursue that form of leadership, the individual must enter a different arena, become a candidate, build a political constituency, raise support, and win an election.
The political context therefore follows a different playbook. Professional advancement within an office depends on performance, expertise, opportunity, and the trust of senior leadership. Political advancement depends on a broader network of public credibility, community relationships, party support, resources, timing, and electoral legitimacy. Success in one system may prepare someone for the other, but it does not automatically transfer into it.
This example reinforces the larger question guiding this essay. Exemplary followership may develop into expertise, influence, and leadership within an organization, but organizational structure determines whether leadership is reached through promotion, professional specialization, relational influence, appointment, or election. Sometimes becoming a leader does not mean moving upward within the existing structure. It means leaving that structure and entering an entirely different one.
Civic Organizations Operate Under Different Conditions
Civic organizations may also have formal structures. They can include boards, officers, executive committees, chapter leaders, bylaws, committees, and established decision-making procedures. Titles and responsibilities matter, especially when organizations must maintain accountability, manage resources, represent members, and coordinate action across communities.
Yet civic participation often occurs under a different set of conditions. Members and volunteers generally do not depend on the organization for their salaries, and leaders have limited ability to compel continued involvement. A volunteer can decline an assignment, reduce participation, disagree openly, move to another organization, or simply leave.
This changes the practical meaning of authority. A title may grant responsibility, but it does not automatically generate commitment. Civic leaders must continually earn participation through credibility, communication, shared purpose, respect, belonging, and confidence that each person's contribution matters.
For this reason, followership in civic organizations may be especially visible as a voluntary and relational process. People choose whether to contribute their time, knowledge, relationships, reputation, and emotional energy. Their willingness to remain engaged often depends less on formal reward and more on whether they experience purpose, trust, recognition, connection, and meaningful opportunities to participate.
From Volunteer to Colleague
My own civic experience has made this developmental process especially meaningful to me. Many individuals entered organizations as volunteers with limited experience in public or civic engagement. Over time, they attended meetings, organized events, recruited participants, developed local networks, led chapters, joined executive committees, founded organizations, and became respected community leaders.
Their development did not always follow a standardized promotion ladder. Often, greater responsibility emerged through initiative, relationships, demonstrated commitment, and the trust of other members. Leadership was not simply conferred by title; it developed through participation and recognition within the community.
This is also why the language of followership created the dilemma described in my second essay. I had spent years encouraging volunteers to see themselves as leaders, colleagues, and community contributors. To later describe their earlier participation primarily through the label of follower risked overlooking the dignity, agency, and emerging leadership already present in that stage of their development.
Yet followership scholarship also helped me reinterpret that experience. These individuals were never passive recipients of leadership. Their initiative, courage, learning, collaboration, and willingness to assume responsibility were expressions of exemplary followership that gradually expanded into new forms of leadership.
Flat Does Not Mean Equal or Structureless
Describing civic organizations as relatively flat also requires caution. A flatter structure does not eliminate hierarchy, power, conflict, or unequal influence. Some members have more experience, stronger relationships, greater visibility, specialized knowledge, access to decision-makers, or control over organizational resources.
Informal hierarchies may be as influential as formal ones. A person without an official title may become a trusted adviser whose judgment shapes important decisions, while another person with a prominent title may have limited relational influence. Civic organizations therefore demonstrate especially clearly that formal authority and actual influence are not always the same.
Corporations also contain these informal patterns, just as civic organizations contain formal structure. The distinction between the two settings is therefore not a simple contrast between hierarchy and relationships. It is a difference in how formal authority, informal influence, participation, dependence, and choice interact.
Perhaps organizational structures should be viewed along a continuum rather than placed into opposing categories. Some corporations distribute decision-making widely and cultivate strong employee voice. Some civic organizations become highly centralized. The important question is not which label applies, but how each structure affects people's opportunities to contribute, develop, challenge, belong, and lead.
What Might the Two Sectors Learn From Each Other?
Corporate organizations may offer civic organizations valuable lessons about role clarity, professional development, succession planning, accountability, and multiple pathways for advancement. John Dallas's example of parallel technical and managerial career tracks is especially relevant. Civic organizations may also benefit from recognizing paths for members who want to deepen their expertise and contribution without necessarily becoming officers or managing others.
Civic organizations may offer corporations another insight. When participation cannot be sustained primarily through salary, rank, or formal authority, leaders must pay close attention to the relational conditions that activate commitment. Trust, belonging, shared purpose, recognition, and meaningful voice are not optional additions; they are central to whether people continue participating.
These conditions matter in corporations as well. Employees may be contractually required to perform their jobs, but their discretionary effort, creativity, constructive challenge, collaboration, and willingness to remain cannot be commanded in the same way. In this sense, civic organizations may make visible a relational reality that exists within all organizations.
Both sectors therefore remind us that effective followership requires more than compliance. It develops when people have meaningful ways to grow, contribute expertise, exercise judgment, influence others, and connect their work to a purpose they value. Organizational structure can either expand or constrain those possibilities.
A Continuing Inquiry
I began this essay hoping to resolve some of my confusion about corporate and civic followership. Instead, I have come to see that the distinction is more complex than I first imagined. Both settings can be hierarchical and relational, and both can provide developmental pathways through which followers gain expertise, influence, responsibility, and opportunities to lead.
The difference may lie less in whether hierarchy or relationships exist and more in the conditions under which they operate. Corporate followership usually develops within formal employment systems and established structures of authority. Political offices add another boundary because professional staff development occurs within an appointed system, while the highest office is reached only through election. Civic followership often depends more visibly on voluntary participation and the continual renewal of trust, belonging, and shared purpose.
This reflection also returns me to the questions raised in my first two essays. Followership has always existed within organizational structures, but its meaning changes across historical, cultural, and institutional contexts. If society continues to associate followership with lower status, we may fail to recognize the many ways people grow and lead while still occupying follower roles.
I do not yet have a complete theory or a final answer. What I now understand more clearly is that exemplary followership cannot be examined only as an individual characteristic or solely as a response to a leader's behavior. It must also be considered in relation to the structure, culture, opportunities, constraints, and relationships of the organization itself.
Perhaps the question is not simple: What makes an exemplary follower? We might also ask: What kinds of organizational structures allow people to follow with agency, develop without being forced into management, exercise influence without depending entirely on title, and move between leading and following with dignity?
That question may help us understand not only the differences between corporate and civic organizations, but also how both can create more meaningful pathways for human contribution and development.