Leadership Styles in Hollywood-Based War Movies: An Analysis for Motivating Young Leaders in Military Service Subrato Kumar Kuri1* and Eric K. Kaufman2 1 PhD Student, Department of Agricultural, Leadership, and Community Education, Virginia Tech and Assistant Professor (Study Leave), Department of Agricultural Extension Education, Bangladesh Agricultural University, Bangladesh 2 Associate Professor, Department of Agricultural, Leadership, and Community Education, Virginia Tech * Correspondence Author, e-mail:
[email protected] Abstract: Film has a huge impact on the human mind. The major aim of this paper is to highlight the style of leadership portrayed in academy award winning war films. This can help leadership educators to incorporate specific movies in their leadership courses, particularly those for military personnel. This may motivate the young military leaders for better performance in their roles. Most of the movies portray transformational, transactional, and authoritarian styles of leadership. Looking more closely, the movie heroes are presented as transformational, ethical, transactional, situational, follower-based, and servant leaders. Key words: Leadership Style, War Movies, Leadership Courses, Military Service 1 | P a g e Introduction Students value films as a medium for contextualizing actions that demonstrate different leadership styles, and research suggests films can communicate, embody and articulate the effectiveness of behaviors of leadership (Rajendran & Andrew, 2014). Toward this end, Hollywood has supplied a variety of award-winning files that portray the heroism and sacrifices of different military leaders in battlefield. These movies could significantly change the behavior of the newly appointed military leaders, yet there is limited scholarly literature on the leadership styles in war films. Therefore, we have explored different movies in this regard and connected those in the leadership literature.