Two Leadership Theories
Trait Theory of Leadership
The Trait leadership model relies on the characteristics of various leaders, both unsuccessful and successful and it’s also applied in predicting the effectiveness of leadership. The trait list is compared with the potential leaders for assessing the likelihood of both failure and success. Researchers following the trait approach try to explore physiologically (weight, appearance, and height), demographic (socioeconomic background, age, and education), task-related (persistence, achievement drive, and initiative), intellective (knowledge, intelligence, and decisiveness), and characteristics (cooperativeness and sociability) with the emerging leaders and to know about the effectiveness of the leader. Successful leaders have the ability, interest, as well as personality traits as compared to less efficient leaders (Northouse 2015). In different research undertaken in the last three decades, a set of fundamental traits of a prosperous leader is explored. These traits are not individually responsible for examining and deciding, whether the person is a successful leader or not, but they are importantly viewed as a precondition, which can endow the people having leadership potential.
Transformational Leadership Theory
Developing a high-performance team is important, and for undertaking business activities, leaders should be capable enough to inspire the organizational staff to move outside the task requirements. As a result of that, unique concepts of leadership have come up, and in that transformational leadership is one of them. Transformational leadership might be seen at all organizational levels, such as departments, teams, divisions, or the whole organization. These leaders are inspiring, visionary, risk-takers, daring as well as deep thinkers. They even hold a charismatic appeal. But it is true that charisma is not enough for bringing change in the way a company work (Lussier and Achua 2015). To bring fundamental changes, transformational leaders might depict below four factors:
Inspirational Motivation- the base of transformational leadership is considered the promotion of a consistent mission, vision, and different sets of values to members (Lussier and Achua 2015). Their vision is quite compelling and they understand why they require it through each interaction. Guide to transformational leaders offers them an enormous sense of meaning and issues.
Intellectual simulation- These leaders try to initiate the followers to be creative and innovative. They even motivate them to come up with new ideas from members and never try to criticize them in public for any mistake (Lussier and Achua 2015). The leaders emphasize “what” in issues and never emphasize blaming them.
Idealized Influence- they follow the philosophy that leaders can create an impact on followers only when they adopt, what is taught to them. The leaders mainly turn into a role models, which supporters try to vie with. These leaders often win the respect as well as the trust of followers through their acts.
Individualized Consideration- Leaders serve as the mentors to their followers and often give them rewards for their innovation and creative work. The followers are usually treated in different ways as per their knowledge and talent. They are also empowered to take decisions and are also offered with required help in implementing decisions.
References
Lussier, R. N., and Achua, C. F. 2015. Leadership: Theory, Application, & Skill Development. Cengage Learning
Northouse, P. G. 2015. Leadership: Theory and Practice. SAGE Publications
