Effective Leadership

Effective Leadership

Effective Leadership

Q1: Are leaders born or made?

Ans: What is the nature of leadership? Are leaders “born” or “made”? If “made,” what is the formula for successful leadership? Behavioralists, psychologists, management theorists, social scientists, and geneticists, attempting to answer these questions, have created a complex, evolving view of leadership (Sorenson, 2006, p13).

The “born” side—sometimes called “great man theories”—includes the work of Francis Galton, founder of eugenics and biostatistics. His influential 1869 publication, Hereditary Genius, theorized that heredity was more important than environmental influences, such as education, on human ability. More recently, (Sewell, 2008, p48) study of 650 twins in 2000 concluded that “a substantial portion of a latent leadership factor was accounted for by genetic factors”.

People have always been immensely interested in the qualities of “natural born leaders” and hundreds of studies of these leadership traits have been undertaken. Especially popular in the 1920s and 1930s, “trait theory” research examines the personalities and demographic and developmental backgrounds of current or past leaders to identify those attributes, or combinations of attributes, thought to be present in individuals born or appropriately raised for leadership positions (Meindl, 2007, p32).

One developmental characteristic that has been thoroughly studied is birth order. Research has indicated that firstborn children tend to achieve better educational results. Also, firstborn children—especially firstborn sons—have been overrepresented in business leadership, but they “tend to be underrepresented in the political arena and revolutionaries are much less often firstborn children”. Other areas of study have included gender, social class, orphanhood, parental relationships, mentor relationships, and locations and eras of birth (Luthans, 2008, 16).

Personality traits most commonly related to effectiveness in positions of responsibility include high energy levels, tolerance of stress, intelligence, integrity, verbal fluency, self-confidence, and emotional maturity. However, trait-based research has not been successful in its aim to differentiate potential leaders from non-leaders (Fiedler, 2007, 28).

The “leaders are made” argument became more fashionable beginning in the 1940s. The essential concept of behavioral theory is that leadership can be learned and that good leadership is a matter of adopting the right behavior when attempting to lead people. Leadership is a term used to describe the act of transforming, inspiring, mentoring, coordinating, and managing people toward an individual's, a group's, an organization's, a community's, or a nation-state's vision, goals, and objectives. In organization studies, leadership is acknowledged as an important concept, but there is great debate about what leadership actually is and how it occurs and evolves. Typically leadership theory in organization studies is spread across a wide spread of perspectives (Avolio, 2008, 49).

These perspectives offer differing views and underlying assumptions about leadership, including leadership as a genetic ability or trait that one is born with, leadership as a specific form of behavior, leadership as process or a way of thinking that is socially acquired, and leadership as a contingent product of environment. Within these perspectives, there are debates about the very need or existence of leadership. For example, dispersed leadership theory argues that leadership is a form of power that ...