Community leadership: concepts, roles, and effectiveness

Community Leadership

Written documents on Leadership in political, public, governmental, social, industrial and community organization is something that began in the early 1900s and is quite broad in scope and content. Various dimensions of the topic have been explored such as perspectives of leadership, leadership sources and roots, traits in leadership, functions of leaders and how the environment impacts roles in leadership. This chapter looks at various literatures in the field with emphasis being on theories and studies on leadership within the human service and community service organizations. The paper is a personal reflection on some of the issues discussed in the chapter.

There are several leadership theoretical approaches that have developed and evolved over the years. These include traits approach whose main focus was the personal attributes of a leader with the assumption that leaders are born and not made. Studies that followed reveled that leadership is a dynamic concept that involves constant change in the leaders, their skills, their followers and specific situations they encounter. Later on researchers on leadership put emphasis on behavior patterns and leadership styles. The next major development that took place on leadership was the introduction of contingency theories that include; path goal theory of effectiveness, fielder's contingency theory of leadership, life cycle theory, cognitive source theory, and decision theory. These approaches are a reflection of a major transition from traits approach to an approach that involves theoretical models that put emphasis on impact of changing organizational situations on the leadership patterns with the claim that leaders have to adapt leadership patterns and management styles according to the demand of the organizational situation (Schmid, 2009). Later paradigms theories developed which include charismatic theories, attribution theory, visionary theory, transformational theory and value based theory. These new approaches now put emphasis on leadership role in encouraging high levels of motivation among leaders, respect, admiration, self investment, high performance and dedication. On the basis of these theoretical approaches and conceptual framework for organizational analysis I hold the views that leaders in an organization create the vision of that organization. I argue that leaders are not trained, selected and evaluated according to their personal traits but in accordance to the extent to which their qualities are able to fit the different changing situations in an organization. Therefore it is important to take note of the development of leadership approaches and acknowledge that some of these approaches are used when evaluating leaders today for instance during an interview qualities of a leader can be evaluated using some of these theories.

It is also important to look at the different leadership styles and management exhibited in human service, community service and voluntary non-profit organizations. All these organizations are different and hence have different patterns of leadership which reflect unique characteristics that are needed in order to achieve the effectiveness of the organization.Since community service organizations operate in uncertain, dynamic, turbulent and political environment require a transformational leader that can best function in these conditions as they have vision and determination.in human service organization require high levels of centralized management with use of formal powers extensively and little staff participation.in homecare organizations the leadership required should be task oriented whose focus is external environment (Schmid, 2009).The style is characterized by centralized and directive management that has little delegation of powers and workers participation that is appropriate for people that have low level of functional maturity as well as limited autonomy. It is also important to note that different organization require specific different leadership styles. This is because some leadership styles that are appropriate in a specific organization are not necessarily appropriate in another organization.