Leadership Styles

Leadership Styles

Introduction

The practices of leadership have existed since the existence of human beings. It is in a nature of human to lead or to follow. The time a human being is born, in the early stages, at the workplace or is it any other area, either we lead or we follow. Even though, leadership is as old as human existence, still it is one of the most studied and least understood concepts in management and social sciences. Usually we confuse management and leadership, although they are two completely different concepts. Leadership is all about giving directions with visualization of future, connecting others within a group and communicating them the vision so that all work to achieve common objectives. In simple words leadership is to inspire a group of people to achieve common goals (Stashevsky & Burke, 2006).

Leadership and its History

The early researches and studies showed leadership as a combination of personality traits in a person who can use them to lead a group of people. These studies were categorized as the traits theories. According to the trait theories, leaders are born not made, and leadership is innate not learned. However, these trait theories faced a lot of criticism, and as a result came the behavioral and style theories of leadership. The latest theories emphasized more on style and behavior rather than the characteristics. Just as the trait theories, the limitation of behavioral theories is that they ignore the importance of situational factors which is increasing the effectiveness of a leader. Keeping in mind this limitation the further research, named as situational and contingency leadership place its emphases on context sensitive leadership rather than only one best way of leadership at a time. These theories suggest that the leadership style is varied and adjusted with respect to the situational factors and other dominating factors, so that the leader best deal with the situation (Ogbonna & Harris, 2000).

Situational/contingency leadership styles

Here as the new corporate director of training and development, we will focus on the Situational leadership theories to train all of the leaders within the organization. This approach focus on the leader to be flexible enough to mould himself according to the situation and to deal with the problem efficiently, applying the correct leadership style where wanted. One thing should be kept in mind that the leadership qualities are either polished or learned; no one is born with these qualities, and in ...