Leadership And Its Role In Management Essay

Leadership is a facet of management. It is just one of the many assets a successful manager must possess. The main aim of a manager is to maximize the output of the organization through administrative implementation. To achieve this managers must undertake the four functions of management: planning, organization, leading and controlling. In some cases leadership is just one important component of the leading function. Predpall (1994) said, "Leaders must let vision, strategies, goals, and values be the guide-post for action and behavior rather than attempting to control others". In some circumstances, leadership is not required. For example, self-motivated groups may not require a single leader and may find leaders dominating. The fact that a leader is not always required proves that leadership is just an asset and is not essential.

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.

This approach emphasize that having a leader with a certain set of traits is crucial to having effective leadership. It’s the leader and the leader’s personality that are central to the leadership process.

“Leadership is a process of social influence, which maximizes the efforts of others, towards the

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.

Since, we know every leader must deal with three important tasks, people, task and environment. Each task is different from another. This is why, the leaders have to different in different situations.

There is no consensus that has been reached regarding this controversy, but many theories are centered on it. Chronologically, popular leadership theories include the great man theory, trait theory, behavioral theories, role theory, participative leadership, situational leadership, contingency theories, transactional leadership, and transformational leadership. Each of these theories presents a unique perspective of what comprises leadership. The main focus of this research paper is, however, the trait theory (Bass & Stogdill, 1990).

leader is, if there is some type of genetic makeup to leaders, or whether skills can be learned,

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

Leadership is a very broad topic; I never knew just how many different traits and skills that it takes to become an effective leader. Some of which I was familiar with, and others that I was not aware of, but now from taking this course, they all seem to be necessary for the role of leadership. The attached paper, will explain of some of the important theories and concepts that I thought were most important to be able to become and effective leader.

Leaders are made up by traits, skills behavior and effectiveness, which are determined by distinguishing personal characteristics of a leader, such as intelligence, honesty, self-confidence, and appearance. However, the value of a particular trait or set or traits, skill behavior and effectiveness vary with the organization’s situation (Draft, 2015). For example, our executive leaders of Humana have their own unique style.

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

Moreover, the trait approach gives a deeper understanding of the leader element in the leadership process by emphasising exclusively on the leader, (Gore et al, 2011). The trait theory does not offer hypotheses about the role of situational variance or characteristic of the followers. Instead, this approach provide information about leaders, and about which traits cause which behaviours and that certain set of traits are central to the leadership process and play an indispensible part of effective leadership.

Leadership is something that can be taught (Northouse, 2015. There are some valuable theories, which will be discussed later in this paper, how a leader can develop into having a strong influence in any daily aspect of their lives. Also later in this paper it will be discussed the various styles of leaders that can affect the behaviors of the actions of each leader. Each leader can learn these attributes or some of them just have the natural capability of being a leader.

The major problem with this theory is that no one has ever found a set of leadership traits that could be supported as truly universal an essential to successful leadership. Years of leadership research have not led to the conclusion that there is any consistent pattern of personality traits that characterize leaders.