Annotated Bibliogrpahy

This self-comprehensive annotated bibliography offers a review on some literature published on the many facets of leadership. Due to the limitations of this bibliography it will focus on seven separate entries, five substantial and two minor entries. The identified literature discusses aspects including leadership traits and characteristics, leadership self-awareness, the WICS approach to leadership, gender and leadership, as well as job satisfaction and ethical leadership.

Taylor, SN 2010, 'Redefining leader self-awareness by integrating the second component of self-awareness', Journal Of Leadership Studies, vol. 3, no. 4, pp. 57-68, Business Source Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 14 March 2012. Taylor's article firstly explores leader self-awareness of self-resources and their impact on others, then describes the process, or ‘second component' in becoming self-aware by self-focus and self-evaluation with reference to the objective self-awareness (OSA) theory. The author's focus reflects the neglect of the second component in prior research in which he goes into detail of how initializing self-focus leads to the many facets of self evaluation against their [the leader's] extrinsic standard, influenced by their motives. This is quite useful research as it holds a differing focus compared to that of my previous research that focuses on being self-aware, neglecting the process of getting there. The author indicates that there is a need to present more research on this process and the amalgamation of leadership and self-awareness study. This article has been an interesting read and enabled me to understand my own self-awareness, however does not urge for further reading.

Sternberg, RJ 2008, 'The WICS approach to leadership: Stories of leadership and the structures and processes that support them', Leadership Quarterly, vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 360-371, Business Source Complete, EBSCOhost, ScienceDirect, viewed 14 March 2012. In this journal article, Sternberg discusses the usefulness of the WICS approach to successful leadership and its relation to other leadership approaches. The author uses a vast amount of previous literature to independently explain elements of the WICS model and which aspects link to previous approaches. The research focused on how the resources of WICS are utilized through trait-based, behavioural, situational, contingency, and transformational approaches as successful leadership methods.

Increasing my understanding of the WICS approach, Sternberg suggests that the extent to which the WICS elements, wisdom, intelligence and creativity, are used or not used reflects how one ‘rates' the effectiveness of a leader. A main limitation in this article is the lack of examples that demonstrate and apply the different balances of WICS elements. Sternberg concludes that there is no one best approach to leadership however an effective leader should choose to