Effective Leadership Strategies in Today's Struggling Economy

Introduction

Leadership can be broadly defined as the process of inspiring, coordinating, directing, mentoring and motivating, individuals, groups of individuals, organizations, societies, or nations toward achieving goals or results. Such a simple definition hides the reality that leadership as a concept is rife with complexity and debate (Allen and Hartman, pp: 10-62).

More important, leadership as a field of study is vast and can be a daunting domain of study for newcomers to the field. Part of the challenge for people studying and researching leadership is the high volume of leadership theories and perspectives available (Burke and Collins, pp: 975-87). Leadership in the new economy with its constant changes required to have an ability to adapt to new emerging business model, maintaining constancy of purpose and core values. This ability increases if the leaders make deliberate choices consistent with the values ??and beliefs of the company. Therefore, today's struggling economy is in need of an effective leadership development strategy (Allen and Hartman, pp: 10-62).

A simple search of the word leadership will yield several thousand articles and publications on leadership written by academic scholars. As such, any attempt to define and summarize leadership will be a complex endeavor that will never fully capture and account for the concept of leadership. The aim of this encyclopedic entry, therefore, is to provide a general overview of leadership specific to organization studies for the novice reader.

There is a continuing debate about the difference between leadership and management, which occasionally degenerates into a tiresome exchange about the mere meanings of words; however, at least a part of that discourse may be useful to us in understanding the true nature of the relationships among power, influence, and leadership. One way we differentiate between leadership and management is to look at the sources of the influence that cause followers to accede to the efforts of others to guide their behavior.

Another way we can differentiate between the exercise of leadership influence and other forms of power is in terms of the effect on followers. People who are being managed comply with the instructions because they must, and people who are being led do so because they want to. Leadership typically elicits a voluntary, enthusiastic response from followers, whereas other forms of power tend to extract compliance from followers out of a sense of obligation or duty, or a fear of the consequences of failure to comply.

Effective Leadership

Leadership is a term used to describe the act of transforming, inspiring, mentoring, coordinating, and managing people toward an individual's, a group's, an organization's, a community's, or a nation-state's vision, goals, and objectives. In organization studies, leadership is acknowledged as an important concept, but there is great debate about what leadership actually is and how it occurs and evolves.

Sometimes we tend to think of leadership as the province only of elected officials, presidents of companies, politicians, generals, and other persons who hold positions of power. In fact these people may be exerting leadership; however, as ...