The process where an individual/leader, who affects groups or persons in organization, assists them set up objectives, guides them towards accomplishment of those objectives and permits them to be effective as a consequence is refer to as leadership.
Many roles are filled by leaders simultaneously. Leaders not only affect others to accomplish desired goals, they deal with conflict or any other issues that may arise and interact with & motivate subordinates. Let’s check below here the main foundations or traits of leadership.
Foundations and Traits of Leadership
The Leader’s Traits
In order to identify a set of core traits that would predict success as leader, researchers have studied the traits of successful leaders for many years.
See Also: Types of Employee Separation
There are certain traits that are indicated by recent researches that significantly contribute to success for a business leader.
These include honesty/integrity, the desire to lead, drive, self confidence, knowledge of the business and cognitive ability.
The Leader’s Behavior
How Leaders Act Like Leaders: Leadership studies that concentrate on how the leader’s style is linked to her/his effectiveness as a leader all concentrate on how she/he behaves in trying to affect followers and what the leader does.
Two major functions of leaders are also focused by the studies that fulfilling the needs of group members and achieving the task.
Initiating Structure and Consideration: The two of most frequently used descriptions of leader behavior have been are initiating structure and consideration.
According to initiating structure of leader behavior whereby the individuals organizes work to be performed, the channels of communication, defines relationships or roles and ways of getting jobs done.
According to consideration of leader behavior indicative of friendship, mutual trust, respect, support and warmth
Participative and Autocratic Styles: Leader can act either in autocratic or participative style. On the basis of information available at the time, autocratic leaders solve issues and make decisions by themselves.
On the other hand issues are shared by the participative leaders with subordinates as a group, and together, they produce & evaluate alternatives and effort to reach consensus on a solution.
Transformational Leadership Behavior: Transformational leaders encourage & get performance beyond expectations by formulating visions, cultivating worker acceptance & commitment to their vision, inspiring their subordinates to pursue them and providing them employees with the big picture.
Transformational leaders are perceived as inspirational, charismatic, stimulating & considerate.
Are There Gender Differences in Leadership Styles? There are few differences in the way women & men lead according to the suggestions of research.
Institutional biases and inaccurate stereotypes of women managers can be better accounted for the slower career progression for women.
See Also: Types of Employee Rights in the Workplace
Women & men do about the same level, which has been found that. Women managers have been found to be more patient, achievement oriented, understanding, and socially sensitive, relationship oriented and communicative than man.
Situational Theories of Leadership
Fiedler’s Contingency Theory of Leadership: There are three components that unite to ascertain which leadership style is more suitable like task structure, position power and leader-member relations.
A more task oriented, low LPC leader is suitable as concluded by “Fiedler” that if the situation is favorable or unfavorable to the leader.
A more people oriented & high LPC leader is more suitable, in the middle range where the factors are more mixed. On the validity of these conclusions recent research finding cast doubt.
Path-Goal Leadership Theory: House developed path-goal leadership theory which is based on expectancy theory.
According to this theory on the basis of whether a person believes that she/he has the ability to achieve the duty and her/his desire to do so, whether a person will be motivated.
This theory concludes that personal rewards should be increased by the leaders and these rewards are received by subordinates for accomplishing objectives and create the path to these objectives simply to follow.
On the basis of situation, the leadership style required depends so there must be flexibility in the leader and he must be adopted the style that is needed.
Leader-Member Exchange Theory: According to Leader-Member Exchange Theory (LME) different styles may be employed by leaders with various members of the same work group.
In relating to the leader, followers tend to fall in either out-group or in-group. The leader’s perceptions of the follower’s similar attitudes & extroversion were positively related to the quality of leader-member exchanges.
See Also: Conflict Good or Bad
The in-groups should be made more inclusive by the leaders suggested by the findings and followers should struggle to be in the leader’s in-group by stressing similarity in attitudes.
The Situational Leadership Model: It is suggested by the Situational Leadership Model of leadership that a leader should accommodate her/his leadership style to the task.
Power and Leadership
Due to lack of power, leaders are not considered as leaders because they have no chance to affect anyone to perform anything.
Much of the power of leaders in the organization is derived from their formal position and the capability to allocate rewards. Depending upon their individual characteristics, leaders have referent or expert power.
