LEADERSHIP CHARACTERISTICS

Leadership Characteristics

Leadership Characteristics

Introduction

Different people adopt different professions and to succeed in any profession it is imperative to for a person to adopt certain skills and qualities. Only those who become successful in adopting these qualities, trait or characteristics excel in that field. Some people possess natural ability, skills, characteristic and qualities to perform a certain task while others acquire or learn what they lack to succeed and proceed. Similarly, leadership is a phenomenon that requires a leader to possess certain qualities and characteristics to perform various tasks of leading people at its best. This paper will be discussing different characteristics of a leader then evaluating these characteristics.

Discussion

Leadership

“A leader is a man who makes decisions. Sometimes they turn out right and sometimes then turn out wrong; but either way, he makes them”

Leadership is the task of motivating, guiding, directing and leading others in the right direction in order to fulfill certain mutual aims and objectives. A leader through leadership role shows the right and correct path to his or her subordinates. Leadership provides subordinates a guidance with which they can bring improvement in their work. A reciprocal process within a group context that occurs when a leader influences group members to make intentional change toward a shared purpose and goal attainment (Burns, 1978; Kotter, 1999; Laub, 2004; Northouse, 2001)

“Leaders instill in their people a hope for success and a belief in them. And a positive leader empower people to accomplish their goals”

Leader

A leader is an individual who has the role of leading others. A leader can be considered as the captain of the ship. He leads and guides his or her team members in the right direction. In order to perform this task well he needs to have certain characteristics. In general it is said that a leader should possess few common qualities that lend a hand to him or her to perform the task well. These qualities can be described in a summarized way in the form of following chart:

Leadership qualities

Leadership characteristics are the set of qualities that are necessary to perform all the duties that come under the role of a leader. These characteristics are discussed above. There are different schools of thoughts with regard to characteristics of leadership and each school of thought describes different set of characteristics. One such school of thought is of servant-leadership. According to this system there are ten specific qualities that should be there in a leader.

Servant-Leadership

Greenleaf coined the term servant leadership in 1970 when he presented the concept that leaders are those who serve followers and that great leaders are first of all servants (Greenleaf, 1977; Spears, 1996).

According to Greenleaf, and to those further developing his model, servant leadership is rooted in providing service to others and this service stems from a natural feeling, or inclination to serve (Bass, 2000; Sosik, 2000)

Servant-Leadership characteristics

Servant-leadership goes beyond being a mere style of leadership to being a different way of thinking about the purpose of leadership, the true role of the leader, and the ...