RUNNINGHEAD: LEADERSHIP THEORIES

LEADERSHIP THEORIES

Leadership Theories

Introduction

In the simplest of term, leadership can be defined as the art of leading people. In a more elaborative term, it can be defined as a process of influencing someone socially, enlisting support, and aid for the accomplishment of a task. Leadership can be regarded as the guiding path, which aligns several groups of people into a direction from where they can achieve their objectives. Around us, there are people who are illustrious from all others, not by usual traits or knowledge but for their capability to motivate others to dream and make their dreams come true. People with such traits are able to generate passion and energy into everything they do and transmit it to the people around them. There is a huge difference between being a leader and being a boss, which is limited to meet senior managers and find that the people around them do what is required(Martineau & Hannum, 2004, pp. 48-50).

Leadership is the procedure through which individual's draw influence over people and encourages, inspires and guides its activities to reach the goals; the essence of leadership is to have followers. The process includes several principles that highlight the importance of goals, motivation, leadership, and communication. Usually leadership differs from origin to origin and culture to culture (Collins & Holton, 2004 pp. 217-248). Authority of a leader is the aptitude to persuade or manipulate the thinking or dealings of other persons or groups. Authority that a leader has can be regarded as the right in a position to make decisions. Recognized authority can be described as a type of preeminence based on the appreciation of legitimacy. Leadership comprises of components such as the ability to use power effectively and responsibly. Leaders usually have the ability to recognize that human beings have dissimilar motivational forces on various situations, ability to encourage, ability to perform in a way to build up an environment helpful in responding to the motivations and encouraged.

Various theories related to leaderships have been formulated in the past by known scholars and philosophers. These theories are an important guidance for all the leaders operating in the modern day environment.

Both leaders and followers have a script about what behaviours are expected of a person to be considered a leader. Important theories defined leadership beliefs about how the leaders have to behave to be considered such, which are pending them. Research shows people use attribution process to categorize (Bennis, 2006, pp. 38-42). This categorization process identified matching ideal prototype encoded in the memory with the actual behaviour observed. Categorization first is linked to a particular stimulus then guides the information processing.

These theroies have played a keyb role in the development of various known leadership styles. Many of the current and great leaders of the world have been following or implementing such theories.

Discussion

As mentioned in the previous section about the relationship between implicit theories held by the followers and the context in which they operate they and the leaders have links with ...