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Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

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For as long as groups of people found the need for leaders, whether it was in armed conflict or for managing the needs of the community and organizing the activities of a business, scholars and others have sought to identify what qualities make for good a leaders. Many believe that they know a great leader when they see them but they may be unable to say why in some cases. Across time there have been many leaders, who by dint of the charisma, were able to marshal millions people for follow them in their cause as was the case for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. or Mohandas Gandhi. Most began with the trait approach which sought to identify which characteristic great leader had. Later study moved to an assessment of the skills required for good leadership which could then be taught to others who were assigned leadership positions. In the search for a single method that would cover all situations, many studies had found that there is no one best way that covered all situations and that leadership style had to match the various situations as they occurred. Situation Leadership Theory (SLT) takes this search further by incorporating the motivating factors and abilities of the workers into account and asks for leaders to vary their style of leadership based on the combination of these two factor in order to higher worker effectiveness.
Early on in the study of leadership, it was believed that people were born with specific traits that made them great leaders. In other words, early

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