The article is dedicated to study of dissonance between the role and importance of leadership in modern creative economy and the level of teaching and scientific status that the discipline “Leadership” currently possesses. While in the developed countries the improvement of leadership, leader’s approach and management style, increased attention to an enterprise’s staff are considered to be among the most important priorities, in Russia the words and deeds do not go together. In HEIs (higher educational institutions) leadership behavior is not taught to business managers, and the problems of leadership are not considered as worthy of special deep scientific researches. The article provides a definition of the leadership approach, a number of arguments in favor of increasing the status of leadership as an academic discipline and its separation into an individual scientific field. The author also presents passport of the academic branch “Leadership” as part of the economic branch of sciences.

Highlights:

► the aim of this article is to demonstrate and substantiate the necessity and expediency of separation of Leadership into an individual academic discipline in the system of economic and humanitarian economic disciplines
► modern business leaders’ qualities or competences that provide individual and collective work lend themselves to definition and development
► humanities pay little attention to leadership the phenomenon (leaders in an enterprise are the people whose influence thereon is disproportionally large), which constitutes a problem requiring a solution
► the study of leadership as an organizational phenomenon having a place in the system requires a systemic, scientific approach
► the objects of Leadership as a relatively independent complex academic discipline are leadership itself as a systemic phenomenon, leaders’ personalities, as well as personalities of the leaders’ followers and situations in which leaders achieve their goals and goals of their organizations
► it would be justified to consider organizational culture and organizational behavior in the context of leadership, not management