Avariety of topics relating to leadership has been presented in this chapter.Some important aspects are highlighted here.
Early leadership theoryconcentrated on the traits possessed by leaders. The interest in traitsprogressed from an analysis of physical-cultural characteristics such asheight, nationality, race and so on, to more complex socio-psychological traitssuch a competitiveness, intelligence, and aggressiveness.
This approach continues to have acertain intuitive appeal. For example, the International Herald Tribune (1976)in reporting the death of MaoTse-tung, noted that the Chinese leader wasgreatly influenced by a book entitled Great Heroes of the World, in which heread about Napolean, Catherine the Great, Abraham Lincoln, George Washingtonand others. Even today the temptation to look at the important traits ofrecognized leaders is great.
Recent leadership research hasbeen directed more carefully towards the situational or relative view ofleadership. Rather than taking the view that leadership is a personalphenomenon related to the traits of individual personalities, the approachlooks more clearly at the impersonal aspects of the situation. Although thisappears to many people to be a more productive approach, the definition of thesituation is far from simple. Some researchers have taken a positional approachand have examined an individual’s position within the network of groupinformation flow. The conclusion has been that leadership is related to thecontrol of information. Thus, a person who is ‘central’ or controlsinformation, appears to have a greater probability of emerging as a leader.Other factors such as visibility also appear to offer promising opportunitiesfor further research.
A more developed theory ofleadership effectiveness that has been successful in relating leadership styleto group effectiveness is known as contingency theory. Through the use of theleast preferred co-worker score (LPC), leaders are first classified as task orrelation oriented. The leadership situation then is categorized according tothe leader’s position power, the structure of the task, and the favorableness ofleader-follower relations. By relating a person’s leadership orientation andthe situational favorableness, the contingency model proposes a rather complexset of associations.
The chapter concludes by brieflyintroducing path-goal theory to provide an extension of the previouslydiscussed models and to relate leadership to the earlier discussions ofinstrumentality theories of motivation.
