Application of Leadership Theories in School

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Application of Leadership Theories in School

Introduction

The organization of a group of people in such a way that they can help each other in achieving the common goals is known as leadership. A leader may or may not have any type of formal authority. Leadership is an act that makes people follow an individual with confidence and trust and they all struggle in a form of team to achieve the overall collective goal. Leadership theories are based on situational interaction, behavior, vision and values, intelligence and charisma and unique traits, which are used for motivating and attracting people towards common objectives. There are mainly two kinds of leadership theories traditional and contemporary (Dachler, 1984). The traditional theories are the ones which are based on past seminal studies based on particular types of determinants used for effective leadership. On the other hand, contemporary theories are related to the educational leadership. As per the research or the study's requirement educational leadership will be kept in high focus as we are going to find out that which of the leadership theories are used in the educational or particularly school arrangement (Dachler, 1984). This paper will highlight the effects and value of the contemporary leadership theories that are used for enhancing the school administrative and management issue handling. In this study, a school is selected to find out the effects of leadership and to inform the readers that how it can be further improved.

Discussion

Both the contemporary and traditional leadership theories are brought into view for identifying that which of them can be used for enhancing the effectiveness of the school that exists in United States of America. Through several number of empirical studies on leadership it was found that most of them are producing inconsistent results (Dachler, 1984).

Traditional leadership theories

According to Gorton and his peers in 2007, it was found that the behavioral, contingency and trait as influential research theories are related to the educational administration. The traditional theories are explained below:

Trait theory

The leadership research was started in 1940's with the studies related to trait on attributes of natural leaders. These studies were based on focusing the personalities, skills and values, motives but these studies were not able to identify the universal traits that support leadership success. It was observed in the period of Stogdill (1948) that the trait theory has helped in enhancing the managerial traits in the non-leaders, but still these traits were not superior in quality.

Behavioral theory

Due to the lack of success with the trait theory approach it led the researchers to study the behavior of the leaders and for this the two dimensional models were introduced. Various names were used that includes initiating structure and consideration that were related to the people and to production, employee-centric and job-centric behaviors (Caldwell, 1992). All of these behaviors are linked to the task handling relationships and dichotomy for leadership behavior. Dichotomy is related to the two behavioral sets that were summarized by Owens ...