LEADERSHIP STYLES

Leadership Styles in Microsoft and Essex University

Leadership Styles in Microsoft and Essex University

Introduction

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. Typically leadership theory in organization studies is spread across a wide spread of perspectives. These perspectives offer differing views and underlying assumptions about leadership, including leadership as a genetic ability or trait that one is born with, leadership as a specific form of behavior, leadership as process or a way of thinking that is socially acquired, and leadership as a contingent product of environment. Within these perspectives, there are debates about the very need or existence of leadership. For example, dispersed leadership theory argues that leadership is a form of power that is everywhere and always present. Conversely some contingency-based notions of leadership argue that leadership can be substituted for and made obsolete or redundant.

Irrespective of what leadership theory one might believe in, the fact remains that leadership is a large and complex domain within organization studies. The field is overburdened and growing with old and new models of leadership, and little attempt has been made to debate or critique the very existence and validity of so many leadership theories and models.

Conceptual Overview

Leadership can be broadly defined as the process of inspiring, directing, coordinating, motivating, and mentoring individuals, groups of individuals, organizations, societies, or nations toward certain goals or outcomes. Such a simple definition hides the reality that leadership as a concept is rife with complexity and debate. 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. 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.

Origins and Key Concepts

The origins of leadership as a field of interest can be traced back to ancient times in China, when Taoist scholars roamed the country to espouse the virtues of good leadership and government. However, it was the ancient Greek philosophers, such as Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle, who sought to define leadership and plan for leadership development. For the ancient Greeks, the role of leadership was to foster and sustain excellence through the development of virtues such as aesthetics, justice, love, physical fitness, strategy of war, and democratic government. Plato, especially, was clear that leaders should be drawn only from the strongest and most intelligent members of Greek society. It did not matter whether leaders were male ...