LEADERSHIP

Leadership

Leadership

Introduction

From Mahatma Gandhi to Winston Churchill to Martin Luther King to Rudolph Giuliani, there are as many leadership styles as there are leaders. Fortunately, businesspeople and psychologists have developed useful and simple ways to describe the main styles of leadership, and these can help aspiring leaders understand which styles they should use.

So, whether you manage a team at work, captain a sports team, or lead a major corporation, which approach is best? Consciously, or subconsciously, you'll probably use some of the leadership styles in this article at some point. Understanding these styles and their impact can help you develop your own, personal leadership style - and help you become a more effective leader. With this in mind, there are many different frameworks that have shaped our current understanding of leadership, and many of these have their place, just as long as they're used appropriately.

Discussion

The essence of managerial work is influencing. Studies have looked at influence strategies that managers use to get things done from their bosses, peers, and subordinates. Choice of influence strategies would depend on a variety of factors, the foremost among which would be the nature of target of influence and the quality of relationship the influencing agent has with the target. The role of target in choice of influence strategy would be particularly important when managers attempt to get things done from their bosses. Choice of upward influence strategy would be primarily affected by the leadership characteristics of the boss.

Rapid technological advancements and the resulting constant change that has become a part of life for many organizations highlight the increasing importance of transformational leadership. However, not much attention has been given to studying the impact of target's transformational leadership on agent's upward influence strategies. Even the few studies that have looked at the relationship between transformational leadership and follower's influence strategies did not simultaneously measure constructs closely related to transformational leadership.

This study aims at understanding the unique impact of transformational leadership on followers' upward influence strategies by including the quality of leader-member exchange and perceived value system congruence between leader and follower as additional variables.

“leadership as a relationship that induces followers to pursue joint purposes that represent the motivations of both leaders and followers.”(Burns,1978) Addressing the motivations of both leaders and followers could be handled in two ways-transactional and transformational. Transactional leadership, involves an exchange of benefits, and it is based on current values and motivations of both leaders and followers. Transformational leadership, on the other hand, does not take the current values and motivations to be fixed, but rather seeks to change them.

Transformational leadership

Transformational leadership occurs when leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of values and motivations (Burns, 1978, p. 4). According to Burns, “the result of transforming leadership is a relationship of mutual stimulation and elevation that converts followers into leaders and may convert leaders into moral agents”, thus resulting in a transforming effect on both leaders and followers. Bass (1985) defined a transformational leader as one who motivates followers to ...