1920s Leadership Style Essay

Over the past couple of months, we discussed several traits, skills, and behaviors that have contributed to the success of both past and present leaders. Intelligence, integrity, charisma, and confidence are some of the traits that characterize many of these leaders. Interpersonal skills, oratory skills, and conceptual skills are some of the more important skills that helped to shape their leadership style. Some of these skills go hand in hand with the traits that are essential for strong leadership. Meanwhile, the behaviors that drive these leaders include inspiring and motivating others, collaboration, having a strategic perspective and trust. Combined, these traits, skills and behaviors make for effective leadership.

Leadership has come a long way with earlier studies of trait and behavioral approaches. Since these were highly directive and non-supportive types of leaders, their main objective was to get the job done within the nine to five work day and go home. Although, this was an effective style back in the early 1900s, a lot has changed in terms of the business setting and functionality that many employees were operating back in the early 1900s. Many of the businesses back in the early 1900s consisted of factories, locally run family businesses that leaned towards a bureaucratic organizational system that suited that kind of leadership style. One of the major outcomes from this era was a lack of relationships and high standards of the work environment towards their employees. Overtime, businesses with help of extensive research till this day realized that in order to have better performance from their employees which could lead to increased profits, they must change how they operate within the organization and deal with their employees. Employees started to strive for more interpersonal style leadership behaviors and improved work settings to thrive and develop as an employee within the organization. Theories such as: LMX, Path-Goal, Transformational, Charismatic, and Servant Leadership were created to help understand and develop leaders for the benefit of their subordinates. These leadership styles are all good in their own way, yet I believe authentic leadership is ultimately

The trait theory focuses on innate qualities and personality characteristics. Based on this theory, “leaders are born, not made” (Northouse, 2013). Throughout the 20th century researchers, including Stogdill, Mann, Locke, and Zaccaro, were challenged to identify universal traits to distinguish leaders

19). Still a part of the Great Man Leadership era, these trait theories just went a step further in attempting to pinpoint exactly which traits of these “great men” were consistently associated with the leaders, in an effort to more clearly define what a great leader was. This was again a further attempt to be able to identify a leader early on and predict which individuals were born to become leaders. It is thought that a major flaw with these theories was the failure to account for external factors, such as the environment in which the individuals were brought up in, as well as the situations they experienced (Horner, 2007, p. 270). Still today we do continue to study the characteristics of leaders in order to better define and understand what makes someone a good leader.

Therefore how a leader’s character or personality influences leadership. This paper will critically evaluate how useful is the trait approach to leadership. It begins with

There have been a number of approaches that have been developed to explore the topic of leadership. These theories try to explain the factors that determine great leaders. As a result, the theories are important to organizations that wish to employ the right leaders that will further the organizations’ objectives. Two examples of these theories include the trait and style approaches to leadership. The trait approach lays emphasis on a leader’s personality traits, while the style approach lays emphasis on a leader’s actions and behaviour in a given situation (Mullins, 2010). This essay examines the two approaches by comparing and contrasting them, in addition to assessing their relevance in the 21st century.

As a growing debate, the question at hand is whether great leaders are born with specific leadership traits, or if one can be taught certain traits over time. According to (Wikipedia.com) the approach of listing leadership qualities, often termed "trait theory of leadership", assumes certain traits or characteristics will tend to lead to effective leadership. I believe that leadership traits such as honest, competent, initiative, inspiring, hardworking, intelligent, and the ability to lead the masses, are some of the leadership traits one should possess. Within this paper, I will examine the overall concept of leadership traits, while observing the traits that were, or can be associated with successful leaders.

This theory is based on the premise that there are certain personality characteristics that are essential for a person to possess in order to be a leader. The main emphasis is on what the person is in terms of a constellation of personality traits. This theory searches for that set of universal leadership traits that will assure success. Numerous traits have been suggested: courage, integrity, loyalty, charisma, ambition, intelligence, honesty, clairvoyance, persistence, arrogance, health, political skill, confidence and vision.

Leadership has been a topic that has been researched for a long time in many disciplines. Leadership as a personality focuses on the characteristics of an individual that gives them power to act as leaders. There is leadership as an attribution this approach views leadership as phenomenon that causes group of followers to have outcomes.(Wu et al, 2010, 90).Researchers have used the following approaches to study leadership; they are mainly trait, behavior, power influence, situation and integrative approaches. Trait approaches focuses on the characteristics, values, skill and personality of leaders. Behavior approaches is focused on the leaders behaviors, differentiating between the behavior of ineffective and effective leaders. Integrative approach combines all the approaches to have a holistic picture of the process, outcomes and determinants of leadership. The approach that this paper uses is situational approach that is not leader centered but more on the significance of the context as an influence of leadership. Leaders should be able to choose the leadership quality appropriate to a particular situation.

For centuries leaders have been analyzed in order to determine what the traits and characteristics of a successful leader are. Leadership, as defined by Koontz and Weihrich (2008) is “the art or a process of influencing people so that they will strive willingly and enthusiastically toward the achievement of group goals” (p. 311). Leadership plays an important role in employee’s participation, creativity, recruitment to an organization, their commitment to the organization, and productivity levels. Over the years, there have been a number of theories surrounding leadership such as the “Great Man” theory, which, according to Riaz and Haider (2010), “assumes that leaders are born and have innate qualities, therefore, leaders

The Trait Approach was the 1st systematic attempt to study leadership. In the 20th century it was known as the “great man” theory. This approach takes a look at the leaders personal attributes such as but not limited to: motivation, energy, intuition, creativity, persuasiveness and foresight. Some of the traits that are essential to this list include: intelligence, self-confidence, determination, integrity and sociability. Thus it focuses mainly on the leader and not on the followers or situations. The strengths of the Trait Approach includes: 1) it is intuitively appealing, 2) it has research to back it’s theory, 3) it highlights the leader, 4) it identifies what the traits of a leader should have and whether the traits we do

If we focus on the idea that people can poses different personality and characteristics can be linked to successful leadership across various situation this would be defined as the trait theory of leadership. Some researcher believe that the ability to lead was something that a person was born with and not something that could be developed or learn. Many people still believe that leaders just have an intuition that makes them good at making decision and developing

The above two theories have largely shaped the conversation around charismatic leadership, providing the theory with context and testable characteristics. The two theories, along with other research in the leadership model, have revived the trait-based approach to leadership.

In the research carried out by Bass (1990), they found out that trait leadership theory believes some people are born to lead because of their personal qualities, while others are not. Trait theory also suggests that leadership is only accessible to the chosen ones and not available to all. In the past researchers focused on traits that were able to measure such as physical characteristics, aspects of personality and aptitudes. The current trait research has pointed the focus to more specific traits like stress tolerance, energy level, emotional maturity, integrity and self-confidence. Reviews of the trait research have found all of the above traits to be related to managerial effectiveness Bass (1990) and Marques (2010). When looking at the results of

Particular traits and characteristics are what allow leaders to lead and inspire. For starters, charisma correlates with maturity. It is a measure of one’s maturity and character. It also coincides with humility. Charismatic leaders know exactly how to listen to employees concerns which in return encourages employee loyalty. With that brings the quality characteristic of inspiration. These leaders have the ability to inspire just about anyone. They also possess positivity, optimism, and passion for a cause and attract like-minded people to them easily. (Roberts, C., Demand Media) In addition, one of the most important skills charismatic leaders dominate in is communication. Charismatic leaders are known to have exceptional communication skills. They are both verbally persuasive yet are still able to connect to their followers on a deeper, more emotional level. They are able to persuade an appealing vision in return stimulates strong emotions. Because of their outstanding communication abilities the whole organization opts to follow these leaders passionately and leaves no room for opposition for the leader.