Leadership Has Been in Existence Since Ancient

¶ … leadership has been in existence since ancient times with various contributions on this phenomena having been cumulative. Regardless of these cumulative contributions, there are still more significant concerns and deficiencies in the existing knowledge on leadership. Examples of these deficiencies is that many studies have ignored the type of organization and culture with which leaders function, services provided by the leader's organization, and the relationships between leaders and their superiors. On the contrary, these studies on leadership mainly focus on the relationship between leaders and their direct followers.

Leadership and Management:

Leadership is described as the creation of a vision or direction for a group of people to follow making a leader to be the head of new direction or vision. Leadership and management are terms that have continued to be used interchangeably though they are very different. These two concepts are necessarily connected and complementary with attempts to separate them likely to cause more problems than solve them (Murray, n.d.). While leadership and management are not the same thing, they must go hand in hand. The three major differences between leadership and management are & #8230;

Managers have Subordinates:

One of the major important differences between leadership and management is that managers have subordinates since their power over others is formal authority. As people with a position of authority vested in them, managers have subordinates who work for them based on the directions they receive from the managers. Unlike leaders, these managers use the transactional management style to direct their subordinates who are obedient to these directions because of the promised reward.

Leaders have Followers:

Unlike managers who have subordinates, leaders have followers because having followers is a pre-requisite for leading and following is normally a voluntary activity. However, leaders across many organizations have subordinates because they also act as managers. These leaders give up their formal authoritarian control when they want to lead and have followers instead. Unlike managers, leaders don't motivate people to follow them by telling them what to do but have to appeal to them by showing them the benefits of following ("Leadership vs. Management," n.d.).

Essence:

The third major significant difference between leaders and managers is the varying essence between leadership and management. While the essence of a leader is change through leading people, the essence of a manager is stability through managing work. Leaders use the transformational style to inspire people to change whereas managers use the transactional style to direct subordinates.

Trait Theories of Leadership:

While there are various problems associated with the early research on the phenomenon of leadership, they were largely dominated by trait theories. Trait studies on leadership basically entailed the analysis of common traits in two or more investigations, which were normally operated differently. Moreover, the trait studies on leadership were almost entirely dependent on samples of lower-level managers, supervisors, and adolescents.

As a result of the problems associated with early traits, there have been recent trait theories that are relevant to leadership and management practice. There are four major recent trait theories or perspectives that have received non-trivial empirical support. These theories are Achievement Motivation Theory, Leader Motive Profile and Social Influence Motivation Theory, Charismatic Leadership Theory, and Leader Flexibility Theory (House & Aditya, 1997).

Some of the major differences between the early trait theories and the more recent trait perspectives focus of early trait perspectives on samples of adolescents, supervisors, and low-level managers. On the contrary, the recent studies are entirely dependent on samples of individuals in significant leadership positions. The second major difference is that early theories don't provide explanations for the links between traits and leader effectiveness whereas recent theories provide evidences that are relevant to leadership and management practices.

There are three main conclusions of both the early and more recent trait theories of leadership that summarize the findings of these researches. First, there are apparent traits that constantly distinguish leaders from others such as self-confidence, adjustment, intelligence, physical energy, flexibility, and pro-social influence motivation. Secondly, the impact of traits on the behavior and effectiveness of leaders are improved by the relevance of these traits to the specific situation where the leader operates. Thirdly, traits have a stronger impact on the behavior of a leader when the conditional characteristics allow the expression of personal dispositions. Notably the findings are predominantly based on studies conducted on American male leaders and apply to leaders of task-oriented organizations.

Behavioral Theories:

The behavioral theories on leadership emerged after the dissatisfaction with trait theories and focused on observing the behavior of leaders in laboratory settings or asking individuals in field settings. The descriptions from individuals in field settings about leaders were related to various criteria of the effectiveness of leaders. The main tenets of behavioral theories of leadership are observations of people who functioned at lower-levels with supervision roles and the interpretations of university students in laboratories. The limitations of these behavioral approaches include the fact that they were mainly inductive because they didn't contain any theoretical orientation. Secondly, these theories had measurement limitations since the validity of the questionnaires used to describe leader behaviors were questionable. The various questionnaires and scales used to assess leader behaviors are relatively long and time consuming to finish (Carless, Wearing & Mann, 2000). The final limitation is that behavioral theories on leadership failed to consider factors like the specific role demands of leaders, the differences in leaders' dispositions, and the context with which leaders functioned.

Contingency Theories: