LEADERSHIP

Leadership



Leadership

Introduction

What is leadership? Is it leaders' demeanour or our likeness of it? For demonstration, if you are a feminine supervisor, how often has an outsider taken you for your own secretary? How often does that occur to your male colleague?

Effective leaders carry the dreams of others to the finish line. The history of effective leadership is laden with inspiring tales of prophets, explorers, military heroes, athletes, scientists, and educators. Effective leaders have shaped nations, corporations, education systems, and the lives of millions of people. From ancient times to the present, observers remain perplexed about the actual essence of effective leadership and how to teach it.

Leadership as a Personal Quality

Leadership as a personal quality is a remnant of the great man theories of the 1950s, when personality traits and other human capabilities that gave individuals advantage over others dominated the literature on leadership. In 1981, Ralph Stogdill classified these personal qualities or traits as capacities in intelligence, scholarship, or athletic abilities for achievement, initiative to meet responsibilities, sociability for participation, and socioeconomic position and popularity for status. Superintendents and principals using this personal quality theme tend to hire only those people who look like and act like the boss, which can be discriminatory against women and minorities.

The primary function of team leaders is to foster team processes that result in group effectiveness (i.e., productive output, team growth, and individual learning). Hackman and his colleagues have identified several major conditions that effective team leaders should implement to increase the chances that a team will be effective. First, a team needs to have a clearly defined, interdependent task; clear team boundaries or clear specification of who belongs within the team; clear authority to manage team members' own work; and a relatively stable membership. Second, a leader needs to establish an unambiguous direction for the team's work.

This direction should be formative enough to guide team members' actions as well as to energise them to devote the required talent and effort to collective action. Third, team leaders are responsible for creating a team structure and performance strategy that enable the team to be successful. Such responsibility includes composing a team with the right number of individuals who contain the appropriate mix of knowledge, skills, abilities, and personalities, as well as the interpersonal capacities to interact appropriately in a team setting. A successful group structure also includes a work design that enhances motivation and group norms that prompt appropriate member behaviour.

Fourth, effective team leaders strive to comprehend and manage the external environment, working to create the most suitable context for group effectiveness. The team should have access to the resources (e.g., time, money, information, equipment) necessary for team functioning and task accomplishment. The external environment should also support teams by giving them the opportunity to develop technical and teamwork skills as well as reinforce excellence, such that teams are rewarded for successful performance. Fifth, and last, an effective team leader should serve as an expert coach, interacting directly with team members to ...