Leadership As A Leader And Gaining Leadership Qualities

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As a result of living in a society that puts a great deal of importance on becoming a leader and gaining leadership qualities, work places and organisations have now resulted in investing large sums in sponsoring employees take part in leadership programs and training courses. The term leadership is broad and open to interpretation. Peters and Waterman (1982, P. 79) define leadership as “meticulously shifting the attention of the institutions through the mundane language of management systems. It is altering agendas so that new agendas get attention. It is being visible when things go awry and invisible when they are working well. It is building a loyal team that speaks more or less with one voice. It’s listening carefully most of the…show more content…
There are many theories that contribute to the discussion of leadership some of which are: Trait, Behavioural, Contingency, Relational theory and the Style theory. The contingency theory claims that there is no set way to lead an organisation. This is due to the fact that both external and internal factors need to be considered by the leader and need to be handled accordingly. The Relational theory looks into how relations within an organisation develop leaders and at how leaders are required to be accustomed to others within the organisation. The Style theory of leadership proposes that they style of leadership is the key to good leadership. It looks at leaders and their style of leadership for example Steve Jobs would lead in a very autocratic manner whereas Richard Branson is seen to be a democratic leader. The managerial grid is also part of the style based theory; it allows people to embrace a leadership style that is both people friendly and achieve target production. However this theory has been criticised of being too simplistic as different people would prefer to be lead in different ways. Having said this there are two main theories that have become the result of this debate: behavioural and trait. The trait theory believes that people are born with leadership characteristics such as imagination, determination and enthusiasm. The analysis of mental, physical and social attributes of leaders resulted in the trait theory being developed. Whereas the behavioural
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