Leadership Training and Its Relationship to Communication

¶ … Leadership Training and Its Relationship to Communication Skills, Self-Esteem, and Problem Solving Skills among Youth

Transformational leadership remains a critical phenomenon as described through behavioral components such as inspirational motivation, idealized influence, individualized consideration, and intellectual stimulation. Idealized influence is the first element and is reflected based on the conceptualization by transformational leaders who behave in a manner that allows them appear as role models among their followers. Such individuals are respected, trusted, and admired (Olive, Gottfried, Guerin, Gottfried & Reichard, 2011). Followers relate with the leaders with the aim of emulating them.

Children's attachment style is normally attributed to parental factors or parenting style. Attachment styles are well formed at early ages even though they are predictive of outcomes for future leadership. Early life shows that bonds developed by infants with caregivers vary between from an insecure to secure attachment styles. The relationship identifies diverse infant attachment styles which are either secure or insecure (avoidant and ambivalent) while influencing subsequent functions of relationships. The research stream shows that individuals with secure attachment style have characteristics of adaptable psychosocial functioning in adulthood (Shamir, 2011). This is because they are endowed with ego resources that are necessary for taking up leadership roles. The individuals facing insecure attachment styles do not have ego resources necessary for leadership and do not seek to have leadership positions hence perceived to be weak leaders. In addition, secure attachment styles allow individuals to engage with effective forms of leadership evidenced by transformational leadership among secure childhood attachment styles from parents.

Inspirational motivation components are perceived by transformational leaders to be motivating and inspiring ways of providing meaning and challenging the work of their followers while arousing team spirit. Optimism and enthusiasm are displayed by transformational leaders through stimulation of efforts of their followers into innovation and creativity based on questioning assumptions, approaching old situations and re-framing problems. The approach reflects the intellectual stimulation component. The individualized consideration component is based on transformational leaders who pay special attention to the need for achievement among individual followers and growth through coaching and mentoring (Mortensen, Lichty, Foster-Fishman & Warsinske, 2014).

Followers face developments of successive levels for potential. Taken together, inspirational motivation, idealized influence, individualized consideration, and intellectual stimulation comprise of the overall transformational leadership construct. Further research should focus on examining on a combination of traits and interaction of contextual factors. For instance, the demonstration of a significant relationship between transformational leadership and family functioning is mediated based on self-concept where there are controls on socioeconomic status. Parents providing supportive and stimulating environment allow adolescents to have positive self-concept for subsequent relationships to adulthood qualities in transformational leadership. There is an interest in future research for examining the interaction of the contextual factors for the traits such as testing for the current study such as extroversion (Shamir, 2011). The consequent experience interest factors among future research involve prior leadership experiences like the scope of leadership roles in college or high school. The focus triggers events for traveling abroad where parents' divorce and particular successes or failures in sports or academics.

An examination of the interaction between traits based on contextual factors promotes learning of the experiences of various adolescents affecting adult leadership development. While the particular issues are critical steps in developing right direction for providing initial theoretical direction while empirical longitudinal and theoretical research is necessary for examining such issues.

Future research can consider the implications of generational and time differences in the study of leadership. Societal expectations are studied based on the provision of greater understanding for reasons why minorities and women experience leadership development barriers. Understanding the way social expectations affect leadership development and an understanding of how to overcome such expectations allows individuals to equip leaders with skills to deal with challenges faced. There are other groups with societal biases on the leaders. Factors of race, appearance, or socioeconomic status hinder an individual's development in evaluating the viability of leaders within early years and potentially implicating detrimental leadership development effects on adulthood. In summary, a multidisciplinary approach is best suited in understanding the lifespan of leader development and answering questions in the progress of youth leadership (Gottfried, Gottfried, Oliver & Riggio, 2011).

Developing leadership capacity and individual leaders is more important in organizational governance. Leaders from non-profit and for-profit economic sectors face the challenges of exhibiting effective leadership through different ways (Shamir, 2011). Leaders should have preparedness in making right decisions and setting necessary direction within the organizations while succeeding and avoiding ethical missteps. Preparing leaders allows groups to focus on various development opportunities such as increasing self-awareness, identifying improvement methods and actions, and building skills. Even as research suggests that people are in a position of improving their respective leadership skills, the impact sizes various elements of developmental programs that are still low.

However, in the recent decades, research uncovers various factors affecting leader development such as leadership identity effects together with the adult development importance for expertise roles (Murphy & Johnson, 2011). Another limitation to people's understanding of youth leader development includes focus towards developmental experiences occurring late in their lives. Various studies regarding leadership development evaluate executives and managers while ignoring young people and adolescence development.

Further, leaders have a high likelihood of having developmental experiences prior achieving mid-management and early development experiences of the adulthood importance. The most critical level includes engaging leadership roles in adolescent skill improvement for viable chances for getting into positions of positive impacts of future earnings (Gottfried, Gottfried, Oliver & Riggio, 2011). Further research on the understanding of leadership concepts within younger ages allows for focus on longitudinal studies as well as the incorporation of research in understanding leadership development and identity lifespan. The technique provides a broad area of benefits. The examination of leader development based on lifespan allows followers to consider broader elements of behaviors as compared to the current consideration of research in early adulthood (Vries, Bakker-Pieper & Oostenveld, 2010).

Various developmental techniques have an effective way of endorsing older and younger groups of developed leaders based on increased understanding of ongoing improvement of skills within ascertained developmental stages in the lifespan. Taking longitudinal perspectives for the examination of such factors allows individuals broaden their understanding of relevant moderators and mediators of relationships between adult leadership outcomes and early attributes. Additionally, there are direct benefits for leader experiences on the issues of arguing early experiences and creating a foundation for leadership development and building on.

The major reasons for the case include greater abilities for developing young age occurrences for self-reinforcing leader development nature. Irrespective of potential leadership development importance in early years, there are elements of research dearth for leader development activities against leadership effectiveness prior actual assumption of office. There are various exceptions where young individuals play the roles of leadership within workgroups. The situations promote the focus on the real leader development tending to take up actual leadership roles and depict skills (Reichard, Riggio, & Guerin, 2011). However, there are various studies isolating aspects of personalities in children such as dominance, social competence, and extraversion as they relate to leadership ratings from peers and teachers.

Even though various instruments of measuring an individual's interpersonal communication style exist, lack of integration and parsimony within burgeoning scope of communication style is intense. There are attempts of redressing the state of affairs through integration of diverse scales of communication style based on interpersonal models that consist of interpersonal (communicative) dimensions such as friendliness, dominance, and affiliation. Critics suggest that there are other dimensions of communication styles. For instance, factor-analysis captures a wider array of existing instruments for communication styles. They may be based on indirect communication, inferring meaning, dramatic communication, interpersonal sensitivity, openness, use of feelings, positive silence perception and preciseness (Mortensen, Lichty, Foster-Fishman & Warsinske, 2014). However, some scales based on divertive factors (such as Use of Feelings, Inferring Meaning, and Positive Silence Perception) do not relate to the interpersonal communication styles while focusing on the intrapersonal feelings and cognitions refering to communication.

A consequential element of integration with assessment of less useful situations based on the observer's interests exists. There is a need to rate other people's interpersonal communication styles. Arriving at such frameworks for communication styles uncovers the major dimensions and concerns of a leader's communication style. The basis of evaluation includes the idea that all things that are said regarding constructing communication techniques are encoded into the language. Factor analysis for such samples of dictionary words pertaining to communication provides ideal descriptions of the number, size, and nature of the principal dimensions of communication style among leaders (Day, 2011).

Other critical aspects of communication styles include expressiveness, supportiveness, preciseness, argumentativeness, niceness (expressed), emotional tension (reversed or assuredness), and verbal aggressiveness. Regression in course of communication style scales on lexical communication factors reveals the strong relationship between dramatic communication and openness and lexical expressiveness. Lexical preciseness leads to situations of lexical niceness and interpersonal sensitivity. The intrapersonal communication scales are less covered with lexical scales. In the end, expressed emotional tension, argumentativeness, and verbal aggressiveness have less representation on the scales (Vries, Bakker-Pieper & Oostenveld, 2010).

Leadership relationships are both dynamic and reciprocal. Responses of followers towards the actions of a leader affect further measures and answers of leaders to characteristics and actions of the followers affect the beliefs, perceptions, actions, and attitudes of the leaders. For successive interactions, relationships between followers and leaders for an evolving scope of time and spiraling performance. Time is critical in the understanding of the consequential leadership relationships based on for intervention for external events or factors. Time may continue affecting the scope of relationships (Murphy & Johnson, 2011). For example, the start of viable relationships requires that leaders and followers may enjoy a transition period as followers embrace positive expectations developed by leaders. There are positive attitudes to leaders where there are relationships that are disenchanted with leaders, consequently less tolerant, and unsupportive of the perceived errors by leaders.

By contrast, leaders perceive less latitude from various followers based on initial leadership relationship phases for the youth. At the start of such relationships, leaders demonstrate conformity among group norms as a way of winning the trust of followers (Reichard, Riggio, & Guerin, 2011). After leaders prove their loyalty to groups, relationships change while followers give such leaders more "idiosyncratic credits" enabling them deviate from group norms without facing rejection from the group. There is an impossibility of testing the theoretical propositions and understanding the development and forming of leadership relationships in the absence of such processes with time. Ideal leadership standards take time in developing dimension for consideration. There is an exception of communication perspectives done with sustainable relationships. The majority of engagements do not take into consideration of the duration of leadership relationships for dynamic and evolving nature (Gottfried, Gottfried, Oliver & Riggio, 2011).

Relational perspectives of leaderships suggest that the development models for interpersonal relationships with relevance for leadership phenomena. Such models perceive interpersonal relationships to achieve dynamic systems through continuous change for such existence. In the beginning, acquaintance stages include each side engage through primarily for impression management. With time, there are repeated elements of exposure among the sites for other frequent interactions of the people. There is a gradual transition of greater accessibility through the removal of communication barriers. The repeated communication and interaction is based on sides for the discovery for value congruence through developing mutual trust and respect. The approach also increases the levels of honesty and openness while subsequently leading to higher reciprocal influence among the strategic elements (Nelson, 2010).

While addressing shortages of youth leadership and promoting their engagement within active community change, various programs on youth leadership development have emerged in different countries. The programs focus on civic engagement; emphasize empowerment, skill development, and self-confidence. While such programs are aimed at developing youths as leaders, most of them fall short of addressing the essence of youth leaders. Another critique of development of youth leadership programs is the focus on empowering youth leaders for the future other than in current time. The future-orientation can be adopted through national culture youth initiatives that focus power, efforts and authority towards communities (Olive, Gottfried, Guerin, Gottfried & Reichard, 2011). Trainings on youth leadership development emphasize on future roles leadership that a youth wield extensive traditional power forms to influence local happenings and decisions. While youths do not embrace clear access among adult forms of influence and power (such as voting and running for elected posts), they are in a position of serving as important change agents.

Critics often illustrate the ways the youth can successfully engage communities in creating change. This is possible via community service, serving on committees, conducting needs assessments, and participating in organizing efforts, and attending community meetings, marches and rallies. The strategies of promoting community change where youths have capacities of employing allows trainings on youth leadership development to foster youth leadership, and youths remove viable and valuable resources of community change. The concept is essential in involving youth as current leaders instead of waiting for their adulthood years. Youth embraces both awareness and the desire of creating and implementing change.

The focus of involving youth is beneficial in the creation of meaningful community changes and instills proper concepts of community inclusion and leadership early in life. A behavioral pattern as well as habits established across adolescence persists into years of adulthood for promotion of leadership and civic engagement in youth. On the other hand, the youths produce extensive cadre of adults with a preparedness of stewarding the society into the future (Reichard, Riggio, & Guerin, 2011).

The discussion about leaders' approaches to working with other followers includes the diversion of youth focus to the leadership roles while providing guidance without compulsion into doing anything. Leaders should play mentorship roles as they teach and demonstrate skills to various people others. Youth knows that leaders proceed to help in pointing out the ideal directions for complete life incorporation. The focus shifts from maximizing control over another person's followers and motivate them into taking on leadership roles. The ideas reflect lived experiences by youths under the control of other contexts, including home and school life (Mortensen, Lichty, Foster-Fishman & Warsinske, 2014).

Active youth leader cannot reify such power dynamics without believing and supporting fellow youth leaders through capacities for joining change efforts. Blog narratives illustrate overwhelming focus towards helping and guiding others. Youths describe leadership as the act of motivating others into developing younger generations and bettering them as future leaders. Youths understand that guidance is the basis for leadership. Instead of describing leadership as processes where leaders have efficient management of their followers, there is an emphasis of dedication and support of others' development.

The youth takes into account the fact those leaders for having impacts to current situations and the decisions and actions influencing different future generations. The guidance notion serves a critical role in the framework as leaders transmit their skills among future leaders with increased needs to personal abilities and holding on to continuous community betterment cycles. Youths summarize the idea through proper leadership amounting to improved ways of sustaining the process of keeping the generations of leadership while adding to other skills. The elements enable leaders to teach and learn from others. It is important to stress that effective leaders behave as mentors and models for followers and work collectively towards creating and implementing change. Youth explanation shows that leaders work through collaborating, modeling, and mentoring to the groups of how best to work towards common good and create change (Day, 2011).