Leadership: Challenges in the Integration of Trait and Behavioral Theories in a Defense Contract Organization

Table of Contents

CHAPTER 01: INTRODUCTION3

Problem Statement5

Purpose Statement5

CHAPTER 02: LITERATURE REVIEW6

Lockheed Martin Corporation: Evaluating Leadership Potential7

CHAPTER 03: METHODOLOGY9

Research Design9

CHAPTER 04: CONCLUSION10

REFERENCES11

CHAPTER 01: INTRODUCTION

The traditional view of leadership states that leaders are those who lead a team either because they are physically stronger than any other or, as chosen by those who have the right to do so, or because they are elected. This is an old perspective of leadership. We live in the knowledge era, where power is from the official figures of authority were the power to convey the right ideas to develop and promote new thoughts, better ways to do things like new products can be done. This is impermanent; it keeps on changing from person to person, where there is rapid modernization. In the words of Bass (1990), “there are number definitions of leadership as there are people who have tried, the term should be defined.” Like many previous researchers have dedicated their study on leadership revision and have published many theories about leadership (Pearce & Manz, 2011).

The evaluation of leadership literature shows a growing number of thoughts from the “Great Man” and “trait theories” to “Transformational leadership”. While early theories tend to focus on the distinctiveness and actions of successful leaders, they later theories started focusing on conceptual nature of leadership. Each of these theories is more an individualistic perspective of a leader, even if school of thought increasingly recognized that “distributed” leadership. This approach with its basic fundamentals in sociology, psychology and political science instead of in time management defines it as a process that is distributed throughout the company and not owned exclusively by the officially nominated leader. The stress is thus transferred from growth of “leaders” to develop “leaderful 'organizations', with collective responsibility for the leadership.” Trait theory: The Trait theory features from the theory of “Great Man” which defines it as a method to identify the key features of good leaders. It is supposed that through this critical approach qualities could be isolated and that people with distinct qualities could be employed, chosen and put into leadership positions. The problem with this theory was that it was difficult to define the distinct qualities and if once they were defined it was difficult to match the people with these qualities. But this does not determined that a person cannot be a leader. The reliability in the results was less but there were some traits which were common. They were: friendliness, social skill, emotional skill, group task, motivational level, intelligence. On the basis of these traits the person could be evaluated. Behavior theory: The result of Trait theory was no sufficient. It was not possible to measure the characteristics like honesty, loyalty, faithfulness, or diligence. So another approach was to be developed. The theory which was developed to overcome this problem was behavior theory developed by “Douglas McGregor”. His theory stressed on the overall performance and output of the ...