History of the Leadership Style and Approaches

CHAPTHER 1: INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background to the study

Providentially, over the past several decades have much of the leadership study been completed which aid researcher to obtain much deeper information with regard to the history of the leadership style and approaches (Eagly, 2007). Based on Katz & Kahn (1978), leadership is referring to a process which is leaders or employers to lead or guide the followers or employees work together towards particular goals (Holt et al., 2009). Leadership have greatest possible to influence performance of employees, management and organization (Wang et al., 2005). The interaction between employers and employee is very important in terms of employees’ productivity and efficiency. The concrete leadership actions such as offering right of make decision have been shown to play a role in influencing employee performance. Previous studies were related leadership style with organizational outcome (Blake and Mouton, 1964).

Recently, employees’ perspective has been focused by researchers (Vigoda‐Gadot, 2007). Leadership style has been divided into two different styles which are transactional and transformational (e.g. Bass, 1985; Burns, 1978). House (1977) mentioned that the transformational leadership is generously obeyed and accepted by the employees, because the transformational leaders will offer power, this increase follower’s self-confidence. Transformational leaders may encourage the subordinates break through themselves for providing better way or better service to complete their tasks. Conversely, transactional leaders adhere to the existing regulations and rules and leaders work within the organizational constraints. This leader is less to gain trust and commitment of followers (Chen and Silverthorne, 2005).

Different leadership styles can determine different performance of employee. Leadership styles would cause employee’s increase or decrease in their performance level (Whitworth, 2011). In most corporations, employees do not agree with the way of leadership style of their leaders. They feel unfulfilled, unhappy, unfair, pressurized, strict, and so on. Dalakoura (2010) asserted most of the time; the behavior of leaders will lead to bad performance, triggering a vicious circle of worsening performance and growing alienation. Job performance, effectiveness, productivity, employee satisfaction, organizational growth, organizational reputation and turnover intention are influence by leadership style.

Nowadays, there are many organization focuses on “how well an employee performs on the job”. However, Topper, (2007) asserted that the relationship between employee and employers is main factor to achieve desired goals. Most of the leaders believe that the main factors lead to farther away from the organization goals is due to employees do not perform well. However, in most of the time, the problem is come from leaders. Leaders will be affected by the first impression, for instance, the subordinate do not have good presentation or a missed deadline. After that, leaders will pay more attention in the following work. Employers begin to lose confidence and trust about employees’ ability. Employee will have negative emotion such as they are not appreciated, this will limit their involvement with their supervisor. As a result, employees would not be performing well.