CRITICAL ANALYSIS

Critical Analysis of Classical and Contemporary Theory for the

Management and Leadership

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Critical Analysis of Classical and Contemporary Theory for the

Management and Leadership

Introduction

Management and Leadership theories have changed with the passage of time in order to cope up with the existing demand and need of the business world. The business environment is quite dynamic, along with a rapid changing behaviour of people who works in the organizations. This demand gain the interest of academics and theories to transform the classical leadership theories and approaches, like the situational leadership approach, the behaviour or style approach, and the trait approach towards contemporary leadership and management theories.

Discussion

The classical theories of criticized for their narrow and determined perspective that fails to include reality of leadership/ management. These theories assume that there is unidirectional leaders' personal influence on other individuals. Traditionally, leaders are conceptualized as a person with certain personality traits and perceived as an active player in the leadership process. Moreover, followers are considered as reactive and passive; whereas, the relationship between leader/ manager and followers is formal in nature and follows hierarchy. This refers that it is evident that who is the leader and has power, and who is a follower and follow instructions (Humphreys, Ingram, Kernek & Sadler, 2007, pp.135-152).

Similarly, classical theories of management and leadership fail in fulfilling the clear empirical evidence for the traits' influence on leadership effectiveness, and the leadership emergence leads to a specific behaviour type. The below critical reflection make it apparent that by defining patterns of leadership behaviour or individual characteristics is not enough to explain management and leadership because it varies with situational differences.

Most of the contemporary theory regards the leadership process as an interaction process, but in the classical theories, there are principal behaviours and characteristics of the leader. On the other hand, contemporary theories emphasizes on leadership as an interactive and complex process. In addition, contemporary theories do not presuppose the pre-determined circumstances' existence, where roles of follower and leader are clearly set based on the formal hierarchy. Despite, formal position of organizational members are typically viewed as intentionally acting ones who are chasing certain goals depends on mutual and personal interest, and even on who are persuading one another reciprocally. As a result, each employee in an organization is equally capable to move in the managerial position or to become a leader so that formal classification ...