Leadership

Leadership is the process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal. Leadership may be defined as a person embodying the will of a group; as a combination of special traits or characteristics that individuals possess enabling them to induce others to accomplish tasks; or as the things leaders do to bring about change in a group. The leadership process involves leaders, those who engage in leadership, and followers, those toward whom leadership is directed.

It is difficult to find one overall definition of leadership, but most definitions of leadership contain the elements found in Ralph M. Stogdills classic definition of leadership as the process (act) of influencing the activities of an organized group in its efforts toward goal setting and goal achievement. Leadership is a process involving three key elements: influencing others to behave in a certain way; working with people in a group context; and influencing group members in the direction of goal accomplishment. More recent discussion of the notion of leadership tends to highlight the leader as a manager of meaning, focusing on how leaders engage in “sense-making” in the organization. In both cases leadership is seen as a process whereby the leader identifies what is important in the organizational context.

Leadership is in many ways similar to management. Leadership and management both involve influence, entail working with people, and are concerned with goal accomplishment. Nevertheless, the functions of leadership may also be seen as quite different from management. While management produces order and consistency, leadership produces change and movement. In this perspective the primary functions of management are concerned with planning, organizing, staffing, and controlling. The primary functions of leadership are concerned with establishing direction, aligning, motivating, and inspiring people.

Throughout history, several different approaches to leadership have been proposed. An early systematic attempt to study leadership was the trait approach that dominated the scene up to the late 1940s. The trait approach seeks to determine the personal qualities and characteristics of leaders and suggests that leaders are born with special traits that make them great leaders. Among the many traits contributing to leadership identified in this tradition are intelligence, self-confidence, determination, integrity, and sociability.

In contrast to the trait approach, the skills approach emphasizes the competencies needed for effective leadership. While the trait approach implies a belief that leaders are born rather than made, the skills approach implies that leadership competences could be learned. An early work in this tradition is the three-skills approach, distinguishing between three basic personal skills: technical, human, and conceptual. It is important for leaders to have all three skills, but at different levels of the management structure, some skills are more important than others. The important skills for top management are human and conceptual skills, for middle management all three skills are important, and for supervisory management technical and human skills are important. Later models point furthermore to the importance of problem-solving skills, social judgment skills, and knowledge.

A change of focus from the personal characteristics of leaders to their behavior as leaders led to the development of the style approach that was important during the late 1950s and 1960s. In the early work on leadership behavior by a group of researchers from Ohio State University, the empirical studies showed that responses clustered around two general types of leader behavior: initiating structure and consideration. Initiating structure behaviors include organizing work, defining role responsibilities, and scheduling work activities. Consideration behaviors are relationship-oriented behaviors and include building respect, trust, and liking between leaders and followers.

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