LEADERSHIP DOES NOT

HAVE A TEMPORAL
PRECEDENCE TO
PERFORMANCE

BY:

WAJIHA SULMAN (18730)

WASHMA MUSHIR (18709)
Leadership has always been a trait highly idealized and a skill fervently demanded by businesses,
firms, agencies, and countries alike as a spearhead towards excellence and efficiency. It was taught
where it could not be inherited, even if it meant decades of research and lumps of bags of money.
Even today, leadership is one of the most essential of the traits to be found in a person aiming to be a
paramount or stay at the forefront of any entity, country, project, etc.

Due to the broad expanse of this skill/trait/action and the unending fascination with it, people over the
time formed many opinions over it. Thus, leadership was branched out in different types such as
democratic, autocratic, laissez faire, etc. However, these branches only catered to the managerial
styles and corporate attitudes of people in the positions of authority and power.

As time went on, many more types were introduced such as transformational, authentic, ethical, etc.
to cater to the previously disregarded ideas like that of affective effect, inspirationality, vision, morals,
intellect, attention, and commitment, of the leader. The newer generation of such diversifications in
leadership, even though were inherently different from the previous types, were faced with criticism.

It was proclaimed that leadership does not have any temporal precedence whatsoever over
performance of a firm or a team. Since every type of management style has a name, leadership is a
hoax. Anyone could do whatever and be called a leader. It had no effect on the performance of a
team or a firm and that the perception of leadership came after the results achieved by an individual
and the people under the said individual’s influence. 

On the contrary, it is imperative to have a leader that motivates you to do better, shows you the way
forward, puts out fires when something goes wrong, has your back when you need it the most, boosts
your morale and herds opportunities your way for you to grow and excel. A leader that is not just
driving the team but also mentoring every member for success.

The differentiation between the managerial styles of leaders and the personalities and morals of
leaders is of utter importance and urgency. Even though the managerial styles do exist, they do not
necessarily define leadership as a whole. The newer diversifications augment not only the full extent

2
LEADERSHIP DOES NOT HAVE A TEMPORAL
PRECEDENCE TO PERFORMANCE
of defining a leader but also ways to actually build a team that commits and performs better as an
effect of the personality of the leader and the environment the leader is able to create. 

According to a study done by Sara Yaqoob and Qaisar Abbas on the effects of leadership
development in Pakistan, it was observed that around 50% of employees’ performance was
influenced by the quality and the perception of the leadership. There was another study conducted by
Silke Astrid Eisenbeiss, Daan van Knippenberg and Clemens Maximilian Fahrbach about the
correlation of ethical leadership of CEOs and firms’ performances which further builds onto the
argument that indeed leadership drives performance and is positively related as a cause of efficiency,
high team morale, commitment, and motivation.

It would be a better argument to say that the performance is not affected by one’s management style,
rather the work ethics, way of interpersonal and group communication, sharing of vision, cultivation of
a healthy working environment, and curating of various other non-monetary, affective, and
psychological factors that leads to a boost in employee confidence and commitment. This, in turn,
results in better performance and efficiency of the people and the firms.

Leadership skills is just an umbrella term for different factors, comprising many components:
coaching, training and development, empowerment, participation and delegation. Overall, these
elements play a major role when it comes to employees’ performances. Together as leadership
development variables, these five variables illustrate a beneficial influence as the employees move on
to be more cooperative. The leadership development and employee performance were measured
keeping in view this hypothetical model through a survey (a study by Sara Yaqoob and Qaisar
Abbas).

The survey as a main source was structured to measure the effectiveness of the six theories (the 6-L
framework by Tirmizi which is: Leads and encourage change, lives by example, Lauds achievement,
lends a vision, Leverages learning and development, and Looks out for other), and supporting
material and analysis already carried out from international publications, which were accessible online
as a secondary source, was used to validate the results. The survey was conducted by numerous
organizations. There were different theories that were developed as the concept of leadership skills
was studied. To prove if the theories were accurate or not, there was a need for a questionnaire or a
survey. The study was primarily directed at exploring the effect of leadership growth on employee
3
LEADERSHIP DOES NOT HAVE A TEMPORAL
PRECEDENCE TO PERFORMANCE
success. A total of 200 questionnaires were distributed among firms for the data and the results
demonstrated that the general hypothesis about leadership growth and employee success being
positively correlated is therefore accurate.

In general, the survey displayed that the ratio of male workers was higher than female workers. Many
of the workers were of the ages between 30-39 or below 30. This explains that either the workers had
little work experience or they were new, or at most, they might have experience of around 5-10 years.
As their work experience and ages suggests, most of the employees were in the middle level in the
organization. This means that they must have interacted with people with leadership skills, as they
are meant to be the next leaders. But again, as our theory explains, leadership skills do affect the
overall productivity of the employees, and not everyone can become a leader by choice. For
becoming a leader, the five leadership skills are definitely needed. And through this survey, it is
proved how important these factors are. Not only this, there are several qualities and characteristics
that are needed to become an ethical leader i.e. fairness, honesty, teamwork, decision-making, etc.
The work experience, age or the educational level are important, but not the deciding components for
anyone to become a leader. In addition, there were many employees which were not included in the
survey, as they had less work experience (of around 6 months - 1 year). Less work experience
means that the employees have not been through training and have not participated much. This
relates to the point that these employees were not that much trained or experienced so there was no
point of including them in the survey as their viewpoints may differ from the ones who have quite a lot
of experience. 
Moreover, after the data was recorded, Pearson's Correlation method was performed in order to
understand the data well. This was a statistic that was used to measure how two different variables or
factors were linearly relatable to one another. Any value of correlation that is greater than 0 means a
positive relation between the variables while a value less than 0 means negative relation. There was
no relation between the factors if the value is 0. The data clearly proved that all of the elements of
leadership skills had a positive relationship with the employee performance. This demonstrates the
significance of the skills for the development of an employee.

For any organization, it is essential that all management and workers interact efficiently and convey
the performance goals. The firm can work efficiently if the workers and employers are working
cooperatively and their aims and objectives are the same. Five aspects of leadership growth were

4
LEADERSHIP DOES NOT HAVE A TEMPORAL
PRECEDENCE TO PERFORMANCE
taken into consideration in the report. It can be concluded that not only these, but many other factors
such as motivation and attitude can play a major role in the development of leadership skills. It may

then be examined that all the factors assist one another. And their combined impact affects employee
efficiency, and if appropriately managed, these variables will lead to significant employee practices
and financial performance altogether.

Leadership training initiatives have been reported overtime to be strongly successful programs that
can be designed and implemented by the companies in order to encourage a process of enhancing
employee abilities to improve productivity. This improves the cumulative efficiency of employees in
line for leadership positions, which further helps in the development and performance of the
organization in general. Performance of an employee or worker depends on the person who is
leading and guiding that employee. This can be proven through different experiments as well. Overall,
there can be different research methods through which the data can be collected. Collection of
information on the relation between leadership and performance is not just restricted to surveys or
questionnaires. The implication that all the variables of leadership are connected with each other can
be examined through various ways, along with their cumulative impact affecting employee efficiency.
If correctly managed, these variables will lead to increased job performance and simultaneously
contribute to organizational output. Along with that, it is important for the employers and workers to
cooperate efficiently and clarify the performance targets. As the study concludes, the components of
leadership skills are necessary for one to become one and for the person to succeed along with the
organization, in addition to their desire to strengthen their ability to succeed. Thus, the fact is that
leadership does have a temporal precedence over performance.

5
LEADERSHIP DOES NOT HAVE A TEMPORAL
PRECEDENCE TO PERFORMANCE