Leadership

Leadership can refer both to the process of leading, and to those entities that do the leading. The process of leadership can be actual or potential:

Determining what makes effective "leadership"

In comparing various leadership styles in many cultures, academic studies have examined the patterns in which leadership emerges and then fades, sometimes by natural succession according to established rules and sometimes by the imposition of brute force.

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The simplest way to measure the effectiveness of leadership involves evaluating the size of the following that the leader can muster. By this standard, Adolf Hitler became a very effective leader - even if through delusional promises and coercive techniques. http://www.spicyquotes.com/html/Adolf_Hitler_Leadership.html However, this approach may measure power rather than leadership. To measure leadership more specifically, one may assess the extent of influence on the followers, that is, the amount of leading. This may involve testing the results of leadership activities against a goal, vision, or objective.

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James MacGregor Burns introduced a normative element: an effective Burnsian leader will unite followers in a shared vision that will improve an organization and society at large. Burns calls leadership that delivers "true" value, integrity, and trust transformational leadership. He distinguishes such leadership from "mere" transactional leadership that gets power by doing whatever will get more followers. http://fecolumnists.expressindia.com/full_column.php?content_id=35970 But problems arise in quantifying the transformational quality of leadership - evaluation of that quality seems more difficult to quantify than merely counting the followers that the straw man of transactional leadership James MacGregor Burns has set as a primary standard for effectiveness. Thus transformational leadership requires an evaluation of quality, independent of the market demand that exhibits in the number of followers.

Related Topics:
Vision - Power - Quality - Market demand

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The functional leadership model conceives of leadership as a set of behaviors that helps a group perform a task, reach their goal, or perform their function. In this model, effective leaders encourage functional behaviors and discourage dysfunctional ones.

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In the path-goal model of leadership, developed jointly by Martin Evans and Robert House and based on the "Expectancy Theory of Motivation", a leader has the function of clearing the path toward the goal(s) of the group, by meeting the needs of subordinates.

Related Topics:
Path-goal model - Robert House

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Some commentators use the metaphor of an orchestral conductor to describe the quality of the leadership process. An effective leader resembles an orchestra conductor in some ways. He/she has to somehow get a group of potentially diverse and talented people - many of whom have strong personalities - to work together toward a common output. Will the conductor harness and blend all the gifts his or her players possess? Will the players accept the degree of creative expression they have? Will the audience enjoy the sound they make? The conductor may have a determining influence on all of that.

Related Topics:
Orchestra - Conductor - Personalities

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Suggested qualities of leadership

Studies of leadership have suggested qualities that people often associate with leadership. They include:

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• Talent and technical/specific skill at some task at hand
• Initiative and entrepreneurial drive
• Charismatic inspiration - attractiveness to others and the ability to leverage this esteem to motivate others
• Preoccupation with a rôle - a dedication that consumes much of leaders' life - service to a cause
• A clear sense of purpose (or mission) - clear goals - focus - commitment
• Results-orientation - directing every action towards a mission - prioritizing activities to spend time where results most accrue
• Optimism - very few pessimists become leaders
• Rejection of determinism - belief in one's ability to "make a difference"
• Ability to encourage and nurture those that report to them - delegate in such a way as people will grow
• Rôle models - leaders may adopt a persona that encapsulates their mission and lead by example
• Self-knowledge (in non-bureaucratic structures)
• Self-awareness - the ability to "lead" (as it were) one's own self prior to leading other selves simililarly
• With regards to people and to projects, the ability to choose winners - recognizing that, unlike with skills, one cannot (in general) teach attitude. Note that "picking winners" ("choosing winners") carries implications of gamblers' luck as well as of the capacity to take risks, but "true" leaders, like gamblers but unlike "false" leaders, base their decisions on realistic insight (and usually on many other factors partially derived from "real" wisdom).
• Understanding what others say, rather than listening to how they say things - this could partly sum this quality up as "walking in someone else's shoes" (to use a common cliché).

The approach of listing leadership qualities, often termed "trait theory", assumes certain traits or characteristics will tend to lead to effective leadership. Although trait theory has an intuitive appeal, difficulties may arrise in proving its tenets, and oppenents frequently challenge this approach. The "strongest" versions of trait theory see these "leadership characteristics" as inate, such that one assumes that some people class as "born leaders" due to their psychological makeup. On this reading of the theory, leadership development involves identifying and measuring leadership qualities, screening potential leaders from non-leaders, then training those with potential.

Related Topics:
Trait theory - Leadership development

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David McClelland, a Harvard-based researcher in the psychology of power and achievement, saw leadership skills, not so much as a set of traits, but as a pattern of motives. He claimed that successful leaders will tend to have a high need for power, a low need for affiliation, and a high level of what he called activity inhibition (one might call it self-control).

Related Topics:
David McClelland - Self-control

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Situational leadership theory offers an alternative approach. It proceeds from the assumption that different situations call for different characteristics. According to this group of theories, no single optimal psychographic profile of a leader exists. The situational leadership model of Hersey and Blanchard, for example, suggest four leadership-styles and four levels of follower-development. For effectiveness, the model posits that the leadership-style must match the appropriate level of followership-development. In this model, leadership behaviour decomes a function not only of the characteristics of the leader, but of the characteristics of followers as well. Other situational leadership models introduce a variety of situational variables. These determinants include:

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• the nature of the task (structured or routine)
• organizational policies, climate, and culture
• the preferences of the leader's superiors
• the expectations of peers
• the reciprocal responses of followers

The contingency model of Vroom and Yetton uses other situational variables, including:

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• the nature of the problem
• the requirements for accuracy
• the acceptance of an initiative
• time-constraints
• cost constraints

However one determines leadership behaviour, one can categorize it into various leadership styles. Many ways of doing this exist. For example, the Managerial Grid Model, a behavioral leadership-model developed by Robert Blake and Jane Mouton in 1964, suggests five different leadership styles, based on leaders' strength of concern for people and their concern for goal achievement.

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Kurt Lewin, Ronald Lipitt, and R. K. White identified three leadership styles : authoritarian, democratic, and laissez-faire, based on the amount of influence and power exercised by the leader.

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The Fiedler contingency model bases the leader?s effectiveness on what Fred Fiedler called situational contingency. This results from the interaction of leadership style and situational favourableness (later called "situational control").

Related Topics:
Fiedler contingency model - Fred Fiedler

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Leadership and vision

No matter how one defines leadership, it typically involves an element of vision -- except in cases of involuntary leadership. The vision provides direction to the influence process. A leader (or group of leaders) can have a vision of the future to aid them to move a group successfully towards this goal. This vision, for effectiveness, should allegedly:

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• appear as a simple, yet vibrant, image in the mind of the leader
• describe a future state, credible and preferable to the present state
• act as a bridge between the current state and a future optimum state
• appear desirable enough to energize followers
• succeed in speaking to followers at an emotional or spiritual level (logical appeals by themselves seldom muster a following)

For leadership to occur, according to this theory, some people ("leaders") must communicate the vision to others ("followers") in such a way that the followers adopt the vision as their own. Leaders must not just see the vision themselves, they must have the ability to get others to see it also. Numerous techniques aid in this process, including: narratives, metaphors, symbolic actions, leading by example, incentives, and penalties.

Related Topics:
Narrative - Metaphor - Symbol - Incentive - Penalties

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Stacey (1992) has suggested that the emphasis on vision puts an unrealistic burden on the leader. Such emphasis appears to perpetuate the myth that an organization must depend on a single, uncommonly talented individual to decide what to do. Stacey claims that this fosters a culture of dependency and conformity in which followers take no pro-active incentives and do not think independently.

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