A
variety of topics relating to leadership has been presented in this chapter.
Some important aspects are highlighted here.
Early leadership theory
concentrated on the traits possessed by leaders. The interest in traits
progressed from an analysis of physical-cultural characteristics such as
height, nationality, race and so on, to more complex socio-psychological traits
such a competitiveness, intelligence, and aggressiveness.
This approach continues to have a
certain intuitive appeal. For example, the International Herald Tribune (1976)
in reporting the death of MaoTse-tung, noted that the Chinese leader was
greatly influenced by a book entitled Great Heroes of the World, in which he
read about Napolean, Catherine the Great, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington
and others. Even today the temptation to look at the important traits of
recognized leaders is great.
Recent leadership research has
been directed more carefully towards the situational or relative view of
leadership. Rather than taking the view that leadership is a personal
phenomenon related to the traits of individual personalities, the approach
looks more clearly at the impersonal aspects of the situation. Although this
appears to many people to be a more productive approach, the definition of the
situation is far from simple. Some researchers have taken a positional approach
and have examined an individual’s position within the network of group
information flow. The conclusion has been that leadership is related to the
control of information. Thus, a person who is ‘central’ or controls
information, appears to have a greater probability of emerging as a leader.
Other factors such as visibility also appear to offer promising opportunities
for further research.
A more developed theory of
leadership effectiveness that has been successful in relating leadership style
to group effectiveness is known as contingency theory. Through the use of the
least preferred co-worker score (LPC), leaders are first classified as task or
relation oriented. The leadership situation then is categorized according to
the leader’s position power, the structure of the task, and the favorableness of
leader-follower relations. By relating a person’s leadership orientation and
the situational favorableness, the contingency model proposes a rather complex
set of associations.
The chapter concludes by briefly
introducing path-goal theory to provide an extension of the previously
discussed models and to relate leadership to the earlier discussions of
instrumentality theories of motivation.
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