With Leadership There Comes Power
Robert Townsend once said “true leadership must be for the benefit of the followers, not the enrichment of the leaders.” In return, the way a follower benefits helps determine whether or not an organization will succeed or fail. The final outcome of an organization is not only determined by how well a leader leads, but also how well the followers follow (Bateman 396). Great followers help create great leaders. From an organizational point of view, leadership is vital because it has such a powerful influence on individual and group behavior. It’s through a leader’s power and how they exercise it that creates this influence.
Leadership can be divided into three traditional approaches: the trait approach, the behavioral approach, and the situational approach. The oldest of theses approaches is the trait approach. Here, the focus lies the leaders as individuals, and which characteristics the have in common with other great leaders, such as Martin Luther King and Winston Churchill. This approach follows the concept that “leaders are born, not made” (Bateman 399). It is believed that there are a few key characteristics that set great leaders apart from others; characteristics such as a person’s drive, their motivation to lead, their integrity, self-confidence, their actual knowledge of the business, and most importantly, they must be able to adjust to the needs and goals of others (400).
The next approach to leadership is the situational approach. This approach believes that leaders don’t have specific traits or behaviors that initiate their leadership style. Instead, there is the idea that behaviors change according to the situation. One model of this approach is Vroom’s model of leadership which assesses a situation in order to de ...