LEADERSHIP

Leadership in 21st Century

Abstract

This research paper focuses on the main types, styles, traits and theories of leadership in both historic and contemporary perspective. It evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of each style and their effectiveness in various situations. Further the paper highlights the effective practices in the 21st century. Basically the specific action steps, necessary resources, and ways to increase productivity of an organization and measure improvements and employee engagement levels.

Table of Contents

Introduction4

Literature Review5

Leadership theories6

Situational and contingency theories6

Functional theory7

Transactional and transformational theories7

Proposed Action Plan and Implementation7

Strengths of Old Leaderships practices8

Weaknesses of the old leadership practices8

Strengths of contemporary leadership practice9

Weaknesses of contemporary leadership practice9

Implementation10

Conclusion11

References13

Leadership in 21st Century

Introduction

Leadership is an art of motivating people to achieve a common goal or an objective. A leader has a group of people who follow him willingly (Collin, 1998). Also, there will not be any leader if there are no followers. The followers must have complete trust in their leader only then the leader would be called as an effective leader. Leaders are seen empowering others to reach their own potential. The leader has to have a strong and good characters in order to reach excellence as they have to build excellence not command excellence. A good and effective leader has a certain set of traits in his personality. These traits include honesty, competency, a forward-looking and straight-forward approach, intelligence, a fair-mind, courage; the person has to be inspiring and imaginative.

The key attributes of a good leader as mentioned in the U.S Army hand-book are Standard bearers, developers and integrators. There are various styles of leadership such as participative or democratic style of leadership, autocratic or authoritarian style of leadership, Laissez-faire or free rein style of leadership, toxic leadership style and Narcissistic leadership style. The recent studies on effective leadership have identified set of behavior contributing to the leadership skills of a person. The self-report perceptions of subordinates about their leader's behavior patterns in decision making, interpersonal relations, planning, instructional leadership, and management efficiency have dominated the leadership style research.

In the post-modern literature, categories of leadership styles have increased. Among the more recent categories are charismatic leadership, social justice leadership, gender and race leadership, moral leadership, and spiritual leadership. The global categories of leadership styles are authoritarian, participative, transactional, or transformational (English, 2006).

Literature Review

Leadership related studies have been conducted for hundreds of years as it has been one interesting area of study for scholars and philosophers. They documented the lives of various leaders and tried to find connections and similarities between those personalities such as any specific traits and behaviors. Some even concluded that leadership is inherited and that leaders are never made, they are born (Mumford, 2009). In the past leaders were the persons who had a specific set of traits such as self-confidence, intelligence, dominance and socio economic status. In the years, 1970 and 1980, there was considerable interest in the concept of strategic leadership from the perspective of governance. However, this literature failed to establish a sub-discipline of strategic leadership studies and lacks ...