There are three categories of leadership
theories which highlight the key determinants of leadership effectiveness. They
are Trait Theories, Behavioral Theories and Situational Theories.
Trait
Theories:
There are six traits associated with effective
leadership include drive, the desire to lead, honesty and integrity,
self-confidence, intelligence and job-relevant knowledge.
Drive: Leaders exhibit a high effort level. They have
a relatively high desire for achievement, they are ambitious, they have a lot
of energy, they are tirelessly persistent in their activities and they show
initiative.
Desire to lead: Leaders have a strong desire to influence and lead others. They demonstrate the willingness to take responsibility
Honesty and Integrity: Leaders build trusting relationship between themselves and followers by being truthful and non-deceitful and by showing high consistency between word and deed.
Self-confidence: Followers look to leaders for an absence of self-doubt. Leaders therefore need to show self-confidence in order to convince followers of the rightness of goals and decisions.
Intelligence: Leaders need to be intelligent enough to gather synthesize and interpret large amounts of information; and to be able to create vision, solve problems and make correct decision.
Job-relevant knowledge: Effective leaders have a high degree of knowledge about the company, the industry and technical matters. In-depth knowledge allows leaders to make well-informed decision and to understand the implications of those decisions.
Behavioral
Theories:
They identified behaviors that differentiated
effective leaders’ from ineffective leaders. Based on these people could be
trained to be leaders. The following are three types of behavioral styles of
leadership
i)
Autocratic Style: A
leader who tended to centralize authority, dictate work methods, make unilateral decision and limit
employee participation
ii)
Democratic Style: A
leader who tended to involve employees in decision making to delegate authority, to encourage
participation in deciding work methods and goals, and to use feedback as an
opportunity for coaching employees
iii)
Laissez-faire style: A
leader who generally gave the group complete freedom to make decision and
complete the work in whatever way it saw fit.
Research results revealed that
employee-oriented leaders were associated with high group productivity and
higher job satisfaction. Leaders who exhibited high level of consideration and
high level of task orientation achieved high subordinate performance and
satisfaction. Some studies reported that democratic style of leadership was
most effective, although later studies showed mixed results
Situational
Theories:
Situational theories of leadership studies
revealed that choosing the appropriate style of leadership depends upon the
situation will yield more effective results than following same type of leadership
style across all the time. Among various situational theories of leadership
Fiedler’s contingency model and Hersey and
Blanchard’s
Life Cycle Model outlined
the importance of situational factors while choosing the appropriate style of leadership.
Fiedler’s
model highlighted that
task-oriented style of leadership will be more effective in both the extreme
situations such as highly favorable and highly unfavorable situations. If the
situations are moderately favorable, relationship-oriented style will be more
effective.
Hersey
and Blanchard model
reported that if the employees are highly matured Psychologically and possess
job competency, the enforcing delegating style will be more effective.
Similarly if the employees are not adequately possessing job competency and very
low in psychological maturity, the enforcing directing style will be more
effective.
