Karen Boehnke, Nick Bontis, Joseph J. Distefano (Jan,1999), The earliest works on leadership can be traced back to ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans giving this field a great heritage. . Leadership has been viewed as: a) a personality attribute; b) the art of inducing compliance; c) an exercise of influence; d) a form of persuasion; e) a power relation; f ) an instrument of goal attainment; g) an effect of interaction, and h) an initiation of structure. Researchers in the early decades of this century emphasized theories of leadership related to great models that attempted to identify traits by researching characteristics of great leaders’ personalities. During this century’s World Wars personnel testing and selection programs as well as …show more content…
A researcher interviewed more than 150 individuals and singled out 25 of these as champions. They summarized four relationships between their personality characteristics and the resulting leadership behaviors: i) self-confidence (expresses captivating vision); ii) persistence (pursues unconventional action plans); iii) energetic (develops other’s potential), and iv) risk-prone (gives recognition). The challenge put forth for identifying champions is to effectively manage and nurture them so they can actively contribute to innovation success.
Zalenik’s contribution to the field of leadership has been unique in that he argues that leaders are made and not born. He summarizes their qualities in what he calls the three C’s of leadership: a) competence - building on a base of talent; b) character - adhering to the code of ethics, and c) compassion - committed to benefiting others.
The new view of leadership in learning organizations centers on subtler and more important tasks. In a learning organization, leaders are designers, stewards, and teachers. They are responsible for building organizations where people continually expand their capabilities to understand complexity, clarify vision, and improve shared mental models - that is, they are responsible for …show more content…
This research shows that women leaders practice transformational leadership significantly more often than men pass. As a result they produce outcomes of greater effort, performance and satisfaction than their male counterparts. Men were found more likely to behave in transactional mode. These results demonstrate the power of transformational leadership behavior in affecting results and that woman may have a great predisposition to these behaviors than men. Management is often confused with leadership and a distinction is necessary. Zalenik views the influence of leaders as “altering moods, evoking images and expectations, and in establishing specific desires and objectives”. In comparison, managers are less omnipotent types. Nicholls describes the difference: Management can get things done through others by the traditional activities of planning, organizing, monitoring and controlling - without worrying too much what goes on inside people’s heads. Leadership, by contrast, is vitally concerned with what people are thinking and feeling and how they are to be linked to the environment to the entity and to the