Leadership traits, skills, and behaviors in employee motivation

Leadership and Motivation

Leadership Traits, Skills, and Motivation

Over decades, business leaders, organizational researchers, and scholars have been endeavoring to come up with a perfect definition of leadership through personal experiences, findings, as well as the modern real-world situations and models. Therefore, they have come up with leadership theories, which stems from the multifunctional nature of leadership. These theories further drill deep into leadership traits, behaviors and skills, which may openly demonstrate the competency of a leader.

Competent leaders can be judged by their admirable leadership traits and skills, which may positively influence and motivate their subjects, as well as the other employees. A competent leader serves as a role model for ethics and integrity (Steve, 2009). Here, leaders have to be ethically upright, honest and always tell the truth. As a result, their employees would always be motivated to trace their footpaths in leadership morals and ethics. According to Steve (2009), a competent leader would always be listening to their subjects, demonstrate optimism and positive energy towards their duties as an organization's flag bearer. This would equally motivate the subordinate to acquire optimism in their duties and positive energy towards work hence improved performance.

Communication always serves a vital tool of management in relations to work coordination, information sharing, and duty assessment. A competent leader should thereby communicate the designed roles and responsibilities to their subjects. Communication of roles and responsibilities is a noble leadership skill that provides a path towards success (Steve, 2009), not only to those who promise success in their duty performance, but also to all other employees who are less-motivated in their duties. For instance, if a manager comes up with a development plan, one should as well, accommodate employees whose performance lag and ensure everyone gets well with the plan.

In response to the posts by my colleagues, the admirable leadership traits or skills that I support include the creation of a workplace culture, which values the real people's relationships. A number of employees admit that relationships between workers and managers, as well as the workgroup relationships, will strongly serve to drive loyalty and engagement to both the leaders and their subjects. Additionally, being fair and open is a leadership trait, which does not denote treating everyone equally, but means that worthy leader should develop a transparent process of leading and managing all other organization's activities with a lot of ease.

In the process of production of goods and services, employees are more than just any other input. Business and organizational leaders thereby realized that motivated employees are habitually synonymous to an organization's ability to attain high-level production, which may equally increase profitability to the organization. Therefore, it is vital for leaders and/or managers to understand and apply the theories of human motivation within the workplace context. Human needs serve as the basis of all human motivation theories. Maslow's theory of human motivation outlines the hierarchy of needs hence contributing to the improvement of leaders' understanding on what can best motivate their employees (Maslow, 1943). This theory proposes that people have five motivations/needs, usually exemplified using a hierarchical pyramid structure. These five motivations include love and belonging, safety, physiological, self-actualization, and esteem. Through this theory, Maslow (1943)elicits that humans first get motivated in satisfying the low-level needs in the order of physiological, safety, love and belonging needs; before recognizing and graduating onto satisfaction of the high-order needs of esteem and self-actualization in that sequence.