(FORTUNE Magazine) – It isn't just the quadrennial election follies. It's the whole wearying onslaught that corporate America has sustained over the past few years -- the global competition, the takeover threats, the fears that the U.S. is falling behind in quality and productivity. ''We're in trouble,'' goes the lament. ''Even our seeming successes are jerry-built on a weak dollar, a mortgaged future, and an increased willingness to screw the little guy.'' Then, as day follows night or a kick ensues from a sharp tap to the patella, comes the cry: ''We need better leadership.'' Meaning: ''Daddy, get me out of this.'' Leaders, gotta have leaders. Business school professors have merrily set sail on this latest wave of interest in an ageless subject, launching books with titles like The Transformational Leader, charting sharp distinctions between the leader and the mere manager. (''A manager tries to do things right, a leader to do the right thing.'') And yes, the press has done its bit, nostra culpa. ''It's a People magazine world,'' notes Warren Bennis, a professor at the University of Southern California and a celebrated proponent of the superiority of leaders over managers. ''I do think there has been a peculiar idolatry of leaders.'' What was that? A suggestion, from inside the temple yet, that we may have overestimated these paragons? Actually, Bennis's is not the first less than reverent word to be heard from academe. Michael E. McGill, a professor of organizational behavior at Southern Methodist University's business school and a longtime consultant, devotes a chapter in his latest book, American Business and the Quick Fix, to ''The Myths of Messianic and Managerial Leadership.'' Not to put too fine a point on it, consider the title and subtitle of the new book by F. G. Bailey, professor of anthropology at the University of California at San Diego: Humbuggery and Manipulation: The Art of Leadership. Backlash, anyone? Now, at the exhausted end of a decidedly uninspiring presidential campaign, seems a propitious time to examine the case against leaders. The charges: -- Leaders really make far less difference than we give them credit for. Our exaggeration is understandable. As McGill says, ''It's easier to personify an organization in its leader, rather than talk about the complexities of what goes on within it.'' The academics, in their charming way, have attempted to quantify precisely how much of a difference leadership makes. The answer that most come up with, after isolating all the other variables and doing lots of regression analysis: certainly no more than 20%, probably nearer 10%. It may be enough in some competitive situations, but it's no revolution. -- A leader is only as good as the situation he finds himself in. Which is to say, the context creates the leader at least as much as his gifts shape what happens. Far fewer situations than you might imagine call for strong leadership, or even permit it. Take your would-be corporate leader, just oozing charismatic potential, and put her in charge of one of the company's businesses that's chugging along pretty much to everyone's satisfaction. Go to it, you tell her, but be careful to stick to the company's standard procedures and to the current cast of characters. With ground rules like these, expect no leaderly fireworks. Ah, but just plunge the company into crisis -- on the edge of bankruptcy, or ramparts falling to competitors' sallies, or mired in stagnation so thick it's finally begun to stink. When the Person on the White Horse finally gallops up, give him or her virtually unfettered powers. Voila: instant Iacocca. -- Leaders manipulate people. Robert J. House, professor of organizational studies at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton school and a strong believer in leaders, describes their attributes: ''They tend to have more energy than most people, and they're a little smarter, but not outright geniuses because geniuses don't communicate well with lesser minds. They have a high level of social skills: communication, problem solving, the ability to clarify and negotiate. We call it dominance -- social assertiveness, but in a good cause.'' The key is how they use these skills. According to the trendy wisdom on leadership, Himself sets forth his vision of the organization's future in a few bold, clear strokes. He then rallies folks around that vision, painting a glorious future, providing assurances: ''Our employees are our most valuable asset'' or ''No new taxes.'' Trouble is, the leader is smart enough to know that the world is more complicated than that, and getting anything done often more painful. But don't tell us followers that. Observes Bennis: ''All of us have this sense underneath of wanting to forfeit our responsibilities, of wanting the leader to lift them off us.'' -- Unchecked, leaders can run off the rails, taking the organization with them. Sometimes referred to as the Jim Jones-Hitler syndrome, but don't think it can't happen here. Arguable examples from recent corporate experience: the tenure of James Dutt as CEO of Beatrice -- remember the squirrelly corporate- identity campaign, and the money poured into race cars; the degeneration of Pillsbury's Burger King, including its romance with Herb the Nerd, under alleged transformational leader J. Jeffrey Campbell; the quasi-anarchy prevailing at Apple Computer before the board sacked Steve Jobs. The more credence you attach to the leader-manager dichotomy, the greater this danger, it would seem. John Kotter, a Harvard business school professor and author of The Leadership Factor, sketches a pattern for disaster: ''A very charismatic person emerges during a time when a group is feeling a lot of pain. The charismatic is not a good manager -- he doesn't like managers, doesn't want them around, because he sees them as too controlling. His vision is bad. But the lack of any good management process around him, coupled with his charisma, means he's never confronted.'' -- They don't inspire baby-boomers. In the late 1950s, AT&T tested a sample of the recent college graduates on its management track to find out about their attitudes and aspirations. In the late 1970s it repeated the tests on a comparable group. The differences, as subsequently reported by psychologists Ann Howard and James Wilson: The baby-boomers scored much lower on dominance, even adjusting for the greater representation of women and minority groups in the second sample. Ditto for deference. In other words, the boomers are much less interested in bossing people or in rising to positions of power. Nor are they inclined to act like traditional, happy-to-await-my-turn subordinates. Nothing in the 1980s suggests that the pig-in-the-python generation has become any more attracted to leadership roles. -- Even if we do want leaders, we don't know how to produce them. The only advice you get from books like Iacocca, myth mocker McGill maintains, is a not very helpful ''Be like me.'' For all the scholarly interest in the big L, the argument goes, no business school has come up with a reliable way to turn out the real thing. Even partisans of the leadership model concede as much, though they claim they have become more adept at spotting likely candidates. -- As management becomes more participatory, leaders are increasingly unnecessary. The argument: With restructuring and the accompanying push of responsibility downward, your standard business organization is increasingly coming to resemble a collection of professionals -- a consulting firm, say, or a clinic of doctors with different specialties. The nominal head person probably can't perform his co-workers' jobs as well as they can, so how can he tell them what to do? No, it's up to them to motivate themselves and to see that they do their work the best way they know. Under such a regimen, the efforts of a leader usually amount to just so much intrusion. The hard-edged response to all this is, ''What planet are you talking about?'' Some companies -- Ford, Cummins Engine, parts of Procter & Gamble -- may have moved to give the troops more say, but the vast majority have not. For them, restructuring has meant taking an ax to the work force, with the survivors shouldering greater burdens and keeping their heads down. According to this school of thought, the current talk about leadership only provides a rationale for the remaining managers to run around and control everything in the worst old way. ''Everybody talks about flattening the hierarchical structures,'' observes Bennis, ''but I haven't been overly impressed with the number of organizations that accept it.'' SOMEBODY had better wake up soon. A few reasons why the reign of the traditional white male boss isn't going to go down so well in the 1990s: Competition for the best young managers and workers, the bright, innovative ones, will intensify, and these folks don't dig the old boogie-woogie. Companies that don't change will miss out on startling gains in productivity -- 30%, 40% -- that no amount of nickel-and-dime cost cutting can produce. Foreign competitors, already better at participatory management, will only increase their edge. We won't be able to dispense with leaders, but we'll need a different kind. J. Bonner Ritchie, chairman of the department of organizational behavior at Brigham Young University's school of management, argues that he or she will be more like an orchestra conductor, coordinating and combining the efforts of other pros. The new leader's principal focus: not directly accomplishing tasks -- making those quarterly numbers -- but rather developing people. Says Charles Kiefer, president of Innovation Associates, a consulting firm that ^ specializes in promoting leadership skills: ''The real problem is that people don't know what turns them on. The leader will help them figure that out, help them clarify what's important -- what they want to spend their lives on.'' A case can be made against this kind of leader too: He poses the risk of the ''managed heart,'' to borrow a term from University of California sociologist Arlie Hochschild. If we mix up our deepest emotions with what the organization wants us to do, might we not lose track of what we authentically feel? But maybe that's a problem for the 21st century, not for this one.