LEADERSHIP

Leadership

Leadership

Introduction

There are two seperate views relating to leadership styles: one view holds that leaders are born. The qualities they embody are unlimited. Other concept is that in order to emerge as leaders, humans need to work hard and develop these qualities (Golden 2010, 66-75).

The “great man” theory demonstrates the previous concept and explains that the leaders intrinsically possess personality traits. This concept assumes that a leader naturally possess the required skills that allows him to perform. While adapting this concept, scholars analyse specific problems or tasks and provide leadership styles for addressing them (Crosby 1991, 25-46).

Many people have observed the behaviour of leaders, the affect of situation on leadership, the functions of leadership, as well as dynamic processes and contingencies. Both the economic model as well as behavioural perspective examines leadership as a role whose purpose is to help an organisation to be more adaptable. Leadership can help an organisation in pursuing towards adaptive change (Golden 2010, 66-75).

Discussion

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 (Golden 2010, 66-75). Typically leadership theory in organization studies is spread across a wide spread of perspectives. 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 behaviour, 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 (Crosby 1991, 25-46). For example, dispersed leadership theory argues that leadership is a form of power that is everywhere and always present. Conversely some contingency-based notions of leadership argue that leadership can be substituted for and made obsolete or redundant.

Leadership can be broadly defined as the process of inspiring, coordinating, directing, mentoring and motivating, individuals, groups of individuals, organizations, societies, or nations toward achieving goals or results (Haber 2010, 94-130). Such a simple definition hides the reality that leadership as a concept is rife with complexity and debate. More important, leadership as a field of study is vast and can be a daunting domain of study for newcomers to the field. Part of the challenge for people studying and researching leadership is the high volume of leadership theories and perspectives available (Miller 2007, 56-98). A simple search of the word leadership will yield several thousand articles and publications on leadership written by academic scholars. As such, any attempt to define and summarize leadership will be a complex endeavour that will never fully capture and account for the concept of leadership (Crosby 1991, 25-46). The aim of this encyclopaedic entry, therefore, is to provide a general overview of leadership specific to organization studies ...