Leadership

3 Pages 714 Words

Team leaders
What is leadership? “Leadership is the ability to influence a group toward the achievement of goals” page 131 Robbins. Leaders can emerge from anywhere, and they do not necessarily have to be assigned the role of a leader to become one. There are two theories that support what makes an effective leader.
The first theory that will be discussed is the trait theory. When researching what traits make up a good leader the researchers always seemed to be coming up short. They could not identify certain traits that would separate a leader from a follower, or an effective leader from an ineffective. Researchers were able to come up with six traits normally identified with a leader. The “six traits on which leaders differ from nonleaders include 1) drive and ambition, 2) the desire to lead and influence others, 3) honesty and integrity, 4) self-confidence, 5) intelligence, and 6) in-depth technical knowledge related to there area of responsibility” page 132 Robbins.
The trait theory has many holes in it because it takes more than just traits to make a person a good leader. Traits are definitely a factor that determines how well leader will lead, but how a leader can handle and adapt to situational factors is another big factor. Other researches did not really accept the trait theory, and set them off looking for another theory to answer the question what makes a good leader.
The birth of the behavioral theory started after the conclusion of the trait theory. What separate the behavioral theory between the trait theory are the underlying assumptions. The behavioral theory states that if there were certain behaviors that make up a leader, that you would be able to teach those to others. The trait theory implies that either you were born with what it takes or you were not.
Ohio State University and Michigan University both did research on the behavioral theory. Ohio State came up with two dimensions called i...