Organizational cultures are disengaging because managers hog all the ownership. They compete for advancement by being goal scorers, solution generators. Thus they want to own the best solutions, develop their own answers and just use employees to execute their visions. No wonder employees feel like passengers on the bus.

Theories of management range from academic discussions of planning, organizing and controlling to the detailed descriptions of how managers actually work, an approach championed by Henry Mintzberg ever since his 1973 book, The Nature of Managerial Work and updated in his recent book, Managing. But both approaches share a common assumption - that should study managers in formal management roles to understand leadership. If, instead, we examine management as an activity in which anyone can engage we can develop a much different picture of management.

Leadership needs to be reinvented as a one-off act, abandoning its current obsession with its role-based associations. This is necessary to account for leadership as shown by creative class employees who show leadership by challenging the status quo and promoting a better way rather than by climbing the ladder or by taking charge of others. The main benefits of this change are greater employee engagement and innovation.

Full employee engagement is essential in a recession to get all employees thinking smart about how to improve productivity and reduce costs. This will only happen when organizations start treating employees like business owners.

Popular employee engagement initiatives merely scrape the surface if they don't significantly modify the balance of psychological ownership so that employees feel more involved in determining the organization's future direction. Much of the problem lies with how we define leadership, making it a heroic, top-down function that is very disempowering for those not in "leadership positions."

Leadership as conventionally conceived is disempowering because it is paternalistic. We are far too dependent on leaders to have some special insight into the future. Organizations need to cast off their outdated concept of leadership if they want to reap the full power of employee creativity.

The never ending debate on whether there are any universal leadership traits depends on how leadership is defined. The conventional view of leadership associates it with high office. Recent research suggests that such leaders share certain traits. But there is another way of defining leadership that calls the trait theory into question.

Leadership can be equated with group domination, getting things done through people or challenging the status quo. While you can do all three, there are critically important differences between these three conceptions of leadership. When they are fully worked through, we can see a way to develop a revolutionary new understanding of leadership.

Leadership and management have historically been differentiated by reference to style differences. This orientation implies that they serve the same purpose - to get things done through people. But a very different way of defining leadership and management emerges when we give them completely separate functions, one to promote new directions and one to execute them as efficiently as possible.

The conventional meaning of leadership is based on a single person occupying a role within a group. But leadership can be shown by outsiders, such as when Jack Welch's ideas had a leadership impact on businesses around the world. Such "extra-group" leadership is a one-off act, not a role. A full understanding of this type of leadership enables us to break the stranglehold of role-based leadership and develop a wholly new concept of leadership, one that is more appropriate for our knowledge-based 21st century.