Leadership

A simple definition is that leadership is the art of motivating a group of people to act
towards achieving a common goal. In a business setting, this can mean directing workers and
colleagues with a strategy to meet the company's needs.

The word "leadership" can bring to mind a variety of images. For example:

A political leader, pursuing a passionate, personal cause.

 An explorer, cutting a path through the jungle for the rest of his group to follow.

 An executive, developing her company's strategy to beat the competition.

Leaders help themselves and others to do the right things. They set direction, build an
inspiring vision, and create something new. Leadership is about mapping out where you need
to go to "win" as a team or an organization; and it is dynamic, exciting, and inspiring. Yet, while
leaders set the direction, they must also use management skills to guide their people to the
right destination, in a smooth and efficient way.

The Meaning of Leadership

Leaders
“People who can influence the behaviors of others without
having to rely on force”
This leadership definition captures the essentials of being able to inspire others and being
prepared to do so. Effective leadership is based upon ideas (whether original or borrowed), but
won't happen unless those ideas can be communicated to others in a way that engages them
enough to act as the leader wants them to act.

Put even more simply, the leader is the inspiration and director of the action. He or she
is the person in the group that possesses the combination of personality and leadership skills
that makes others want to follow his or her direction

Managers versus Leaders

In business, leadership is linked to performance and any leadership definition has to
take that into account. While it's not solely about profit, those who are viewed as effective
leaders are those who increase their company's bottom lines. If an individual in a leadership
role does not meet profit expectations set by boards, higher management or shareholders, her
or she may be terminated.

The terms "leadership" and "management" tend to be used interchangeably.

Management refers to a company's management structure as its leadership, or to individuals
who are actually managers as the "leaders" of various management teams. Leadership requires
traits that extend beyond management duties. To be effective, a leader certainly has to manage
the resources at her disposal. But leadership also involves communicating, inspiring and
supervising - just to name three more of the primary skills a leader has to have to be successful.

Leader

• Do things right
• Change
• Long-term
• Ends
• Architects
• Inspiring & motivating

Manager

• Status quo
• Short-term
• Means
• Builders
• Problem solving

Leaders: Born or Made?

While there are people who seem to be naturally endowed with more leadership
abilities than others, people can learn to become leaders by improving particular skills.

History is full of people who, while having no previous leadership experience, have
stepped to the fore in crisis situations and persuaded others to follow their suggested course of
action. They possessed traits and qualities that helped them to step into roles of leadership.

Writing in Forbes magazine, Erika Andersen, author of "Leading So People Will Follow,"
says, like most things – leadership capability falls along a bell curve. So, the fact is that most
folks who start out with a modicum of innate leadership capability can actually become very
good, even great leaders.
 1. Traits theories
2. Behavioral Theories
3. Contingency Theories
1. Traits theories
Assumed that a basic set of personal traits that differentiated
leaders from nonleaders could be used to identify leaders and
predict who would become leaders. The trait approach was
unsuccessful in establishing empirical relationships between traits
and persons regarded as leaders.
2. Behavioral Theories
Job-centered behavior—managers who pay close attention to
subordinates’ work, explain work procedures, and are keenly interested
in performance.
Employee-centered behavior—managers who focus on the
development of cohesive work groups and employee satisfaction.
The two forms of leader behaviors were considered to be at opposite
ends of the same continuum.
3. Contingency Theories
Appropriate leader behavior varies from one situation to another. Key
situational factors that are interacting to determine appropriate leader
behavior can be identified.
Personality Attributes of Great Leaders
Although leadership is a group process (leaders require followers), leadership research
has a long history of focusing on attributes of leaders alone that make them effective—great
leaders. The 19th-century belief that leaders are born rather than made is no longer in vogue—
research has failed to find “great leader” genes. However, the idea that some people have
personalities, however acquired, that predispose them to lead effectively in all situations,
whereas others do not, has attracted enormous research attention.

A definitive review published in 2002 concluded that three of the Big Five personality
dimensions are associated with effective leadership: Extraversion, Openness to Experience, and
Conscientiousness. Overall, however, personality does not allow people to differentiate
between effective and ineffective leaders very reliably.

What Do Effective Leaders Do?

Maybe some leadership behaviors are more effective. One reliable distinction that has
emerged is between a leadership style that pays more attention to the group task and getting
things done (task-oriented leadership) and one that pays attention to relationships among
group members (socioemotional leadership). Most groups require both types of leadership and
people who are capable of being both task-focused and socio-emotionally focused tend to be
the most effective.

Interactionist Perspectives on Leadership

However, different situations and different group activities call for different emphases
on the task or on relationships—in which case, the relative effectiveness of task-oriented and
relationship-oriented leaders may be contingent on properties of the leadership situation. This
idea is reflected in Fred Fiedler’s contingency theory of leadership, very popular in the 1970s;
one strength of this theory was that Fielder had a novel way to measure both leadership styles
(the least-preferred coworker scale) and classify how well-structured situations were.
Generally, relationship-oriented leadership was most effective unless the group task was very
poorly structured or very well structured.

Another interactionist perspective is normative decision theory. Leaders can choose to

make decisions autocratically (subordinate input is not sought), consultatively (subordinate
input is sought, but the leader retains authority to make the final decision), or as a genuine
group decision (leader and subordinates are equal partners in shared decision making). The
relative efficacy of these strategies is contingent on the quality of leader-subordinate
relationships and on task clarity and structure.

Autocratic leadership is fast and effective if leader-subordinate relationships are good

and the task is well structured. When the task is less clear, consultative leadership is best, and
when leader-subordinate relations are poor, group decision making is best.

A third interactionist theory is path-goal theory, which assumes that a leader’s main
function is to motivate followers by clarifying the paths that will help them attain their goals.
Leaders do this by directing task-related activities (structuring) or by addressing followers’
personal and emotional needs (consideration). Structuring is most effective when followers are
unclear about their goals and how to reach them, and consideration is most effective when the
task is boring or uncomfortable.

Transactional Leadership
Another way to look at leadership is as a transaction between leaders and followers—
the leader does something benefiting followers, and followers in turn allow the leader to lead.
Eric Hollander coined the term idiosyncrasy credit to describe a transaction in which leaders
who initially conform to group norms and therefore serve the group well are subsequently
rewarded by the group by being allowed to be idiosyncratic and innovative—key features of
effective leadership.

One key transactional leadership theory is leader-member exchange (LMX) theory.

Because leaders have to relate to many subordinates, they differentiate among them and
develop different LMX relationships with different subordinates—the quality of these
relationships range from those based on mutual trust, respect, and obligation (high-quality LMX
relationships), to those mechanically based on the formal employment contract between leader
and subordinate (low-quality relationships). Effective leadership rests on the development of
high-quality LMX relationships with as many subordinates as possible—these relationships
motivate followers and bind them to the group.

Transformational Leadership and Charisma

Leaders typically are innovative and able to mobilize followers to buy and implement their
new vision for the group—they are transformational. Transformational leadership is
characterized by:

 Careful attention to followers’ needs, abilities, and aspirations.

 Challenging followers’ basic thinking, assumptions, and practices.

 Exercise of charisma and inspiration.

Charisma is central for transformational leadership (there is much talk about

charismatic or visionary leaders and leadership), which has engaged a debate among scholars

 About whether this is a return to older personality perspectives on leadership, and

 About how one can distinguish between charisma in the service of evil (Slobodan Milosevic)
and charisma in the service of good (Nelson Mandela).
Stereotypes of Leadership
According to leader categorization theory, people have stereotypical expectations
(schemas) about the attributes an effective leader should have in general, or in specific
leadership situations. Once a person categorizes someone as a leader, the person automatically
engages the relevant leadership schema—the better the match is between the leader’s actual
characteristics and the leadership schema, the more favorable are the person’s evaluations of
the leader and his or her leadership.

Stereotypical expectations might affect leadership in two other ways. According to

status characteristics theory, in a task-oriented group, a person’s evaluations of effective
leadership rest on whether he or she believes the leader has the attributes to perform the
group task, called specific status characteristics, and whether the leader is a member of a high-
status group in society and therefore possesses attributes that are valued in society, called
diffuse status characteristics.

Role congruity theory focuses on gender and leadership. The argument is that
stereotypes of women typically do not match well with schemas of effective leadership, and
thus in many leadership situations, women find it difficult to be endorsed as effective leaders.
There is an incongruity between the attributes of the leadership role and the stereotypical
attributes of women.