LEADERSHIP

Leadership

Table of Content

LEADERSHIP3

Purpose of Report3

Introduction3

Brief Profile of Leader5

Critical Evaluation of Model7

Level of Fitness10

Conclusion11

REFERENCES13

APPENDIX15

Leadership

Purpose of Report

The purpose of this report is to explore the leadership of Dr Martin Luther King Jr in relation to four characteristics of transformational leadership.

Introduction

Few individuals have made such a significant contribution to the advancement of modern society as Dr Martin Luther King Jr. Born into a family of Baptist ministers in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1929, Martin Luther King also became a Baptist minister and rose to national prominence through the organization of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and as leader of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States from the mid-1950s until his death by assassination in 1968. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1964, his leadership was fundamental to that movement's success in ending the legal segregation of African Americans in the southern states, and other parts, of the United States. Inspired by Gandhi's philosophy of non-violence, King promoted non-violent tactics for social change such as the massive March on Washington in 1963, although he never witnessed his dream of a United States in which all Americans would have racial and economic justice. King's vision of racial justice and love, provided hope and opportunity to African Americans beset by daily hardship and injustice and the impetus to initiate far-reaching social and political change. His ability to transform the struggle for racial equality into a vision with understandable, concrete and actionable goals sustained and empowered the civil rights movement. Furthermore his strong convictions and moral courage in challenging the status quo were matched by a value system of rejecting material trappings and conventional symbols of success (Nye, 2006, p. 144).

The paper begins with a brief overview of the literature on transformational leadership. This is followed by an examination of the identified four characteristics of transformational leadership and the extent to which King exemplified these qualities as indicated by reference to excerpts from personal writings of the civil rights leader. The excerpts drawn primarily from personal correspondence also reveal something of the private side of King which co-existed alongside his high profile public persona. These also need to be read in relation to the quotations from modern business writings which show how King was a transformational leader ahead of his time. The paper concludes with a discussion of how a revisiting and deconstruction of the transformative change initiated by King aids our understanding the characteristics of, and the way we think about, transformational leadership (Schriesheim, 2006, p. 35).

Brief Profile of Leader

As far back as Martin Luther King Jr.'s family memory extended, it recalled a history of Afro-Baptist leadership. His maternal great-grandfather, Willie Williams, was a slave exhorter (a preacher who tried to sustain slaves with Biblical exhortations) on a plantation in Greene County, Georgia. Claiming a birthright to freedom, his son, Adam, celebrated the day of his emancipation, 1 January 1863, as his birthday. Adam Daniel Williams had only a few months of formal education when he left the plantations of east Georgia in 1887 for ...