Leadership Approaches

Abstract

Leadership has evolved over the centuries. In ancient times, rulers and kings were judged by their traits and behaviors as signs of being a good or bad leader. It wasn’t until the late 1800’s, with the development of the industrial age, that the term ‘leaders of industry’ evolved. The following paper will briefly review various theories that have evolved over time. Leadership qualities and roles will be discussed. The paper will explore how these theories have evolved to establish people-centric environments is some Washington based companies. A brief explanation on how these theories fall short to fully describe the approaches needed during emergency situations will be provided. A new framework known as Cynefin will be discussed that more clearly describes the techniques needed to handle situations of varying complexities. This new concept will be aligned to a real-life situation that occurred during a blackout. This paper attempts to acknowledge the need for leaders who can sense and respond appropriately given any set of circumstances.

Various approaches to effective leadership were explored in this chapter. The early approaches used traits and behaviors to describe distinguished leaders. But these personal traits may or may not be necessary for the situation at hand. For example, you need not be popular in an emergency situation, but you need to be knowledgeable to get the immediate concerns of a chaotic situation. Behaviors were either relational or task-focused. These approaches do not address the situations leaders find themselves in these tough economic times.

Fiedler’s contingency model considered the situations by stating there are two leadership styles; relationship-oriented and task-oriented styles. The theory states that relationship-oriented leaders were most effective in moderately favorable situations and task-oriented leaders were most effective in either very favorable or unfavorable situations. It goes on to state that leaders don’t easily change styles so organizations need to change situations to fit leaders, or assign leaders to situations where they will be most effective. But effective leaders need to be adaptable to changing situations.

More contemporary models address how effective leaders motivate their followers, or how leaders involve subordinates in the decision making process, or identify the kinds of personal relationships leaders develop with followers. Path-goal theory explains that in order to have highly motivated employees you need to determine what they are trying to obtain from the job, and give desired outcomes for performing and achieving work goals, and make sure they believe that if they perform at high levels they will achieve their work goals. Leaders need to initiate structure for subordinates, they need to be