Leadership theories Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Leadership theories - Research Paper Example Leadership is ever green immortal and probably the most talked about topic. Perhaps the reason of its immortality is its relevance to our lives not only professional or business but personal and social life as well.It will not be an overstatement to say that leadership is that life-enriching and vital experiences which is crucial for our existence. Its scope is very vast which cannot be restricted to a single task, job, role or a certain organizational level. In this paper I will discuss in detail what is leadership? Different accepted styles of leadership, theories of leadership their merits and demerits and what was the need for the new theory to evaluate. It will basically be a comparative study of the two theories of leadership. What is leadership? Leadership is very vital and its importance is widely accepted. In order to understand fully different theories of leadership we first need to have a clear picture of what leadership is all about. It may sound simple but in fact leader ship is a very complex and complicated social process which depends not only the ways of thinking, vision, creativity, knowledge, skills characteristics and values of the leader but also the followers. Leadership is not all about aura and charisma of a person but a good leader is one who can see the clear picture of the present understands it’s various aspects and through his vision can guide its followers to the bright future. Good leadership (V.Gallos, 2008)is emotional; it compels drives and motivates you to achieve something. It is a continuous process of building and maintaining the relationship between the follower and the leader. In its spirit it is multidimensional which encompasses different skills, vision, process, map, issues, organization levels, cultures, policies, practices and issues. A good leader has to pass the test of time banking on the strengths and minimizing weaknesses while materializing the opportunities and avoiding the threats in the environment wit hout overreliance on any single person or process. Leadership Theories In the twentieth century theories about leadership started to evolve. Classical theories of leadership were based on traits of the leaders such remained the case for about thirty years and then it evolved to behavioral theory of leadership. There are basically six types of theories of leadership. Trait based leadership Contingency leadership Behavioral leadership Participative leadership Transactional leadership Transformational leadership All these theories concentrate only on the leader and do not take into account followers. It was observed that all these theories actually led to a prototypical leader. All the leaders were supposed to have a typical defined set of qualities, characteristics and a set of accepted and laudable behavior. This stereo type leader was a male white. These theories ignored diversity both in the gender and racial sense. According to different studies conducted these leadership theories had many biases. This will be discussed in detail below. Leader Categorization First of all we have to determine what we exactly mean by leader Categorization. Leader categorization theory (George R. Geothals, 2006) says that there are widely accepted and shared beliefs and perceptions about leaders their traits their behavior. Followers have specific and fixed views about general and specific task based upon preconceived ideas and notions about how a leader should be. It includes personal traits such as openness, active, initiator, visionary, focused, determined, interested,