Individual Leadership Approach Paper Essays

Individual Leadership Approach Paper Essays Individual Leadership Approach Paper Essay Individual Leadership Approach Paper Essay The major research approaches to studying leadership are the trait approach, the behavior approach, the power-influence approach, the situational approach, and the integrative approach. The trait approach studies natural leaders who never get tired, have precise intuition, predicting foresight, and powers to help others believe the leader’s approaches. The personality, motives, values, and skills attributes, of this approach, are better examined when studying leadership behavior and effectiveness before researching the values of the leader, related to ethical leadership. The behavior approach has two general subcategories. One subcategory researches managers’ activities, responsibilities, functions and meeting demands and overcoming challenges and limitations of their duties. The management methods consist of data collection from observing, keeping daily journals, job description questionnaires, and anecdotes obtained from interviews. The other subcategory of the behavior approach consists of a behavior description survey design. The power-influence approach specifies the influential process of leaders in comparison to other individuals. This approach analyzes the leader perspective with the constant situation of leaders acting and followers reacting. Leadership effectiveness related to leader power is important. The power controls subordinates, peers, superiors, clients, and suppliers. The way followers behave is also controlled from the actions of leaders. Influence tactics are the liaison between the power-influence approach and the behavior approach. One of the tactics is the participative leadership that is closely related to sharing of power and empowering the followers. This is also entailed in the behavior research. Another tactic is ‘consultation and delegation to give people a sense of ownership for decisions† (Leadership in Organizations, Seventh Edition, Yukl, 2010). The situational approach focuses on followers’ characteristics, the type of work in the leader’s unit, the specific industry, and the company’s customers. This approach also has two major sub-categories. One sub-category discovers the similarities and differences organizations’ levels of management and cultures. The other subcategory of situational research is the relationship of leader attributes (i. e. raits, skills, behavior) to his/her effectiveness. This relationship is â€Å"a contingency theory† of leadership. An integrative approach integrates all approaches as variables, i. e. the variables are the traits, behavior, influence processes, situational variables, and outcomes of the situation. â€Å"An example of the integrative approach is the self-concept theory of charismat ic leadership, which attempts to explain why the followers of some leaders are willing to exert exceptional effort and make personal sacrifices to accomplish the group objective or mission. (Leadership in Organizations, Seventh Edition, Yukl, 2010) The major research approach to studying leadership is the integrative approach. The strength of the integrative leadership approach is its reliability because of its inclusiveness of many aspects of the leader’s style, which goes along with being a well-rounded leader. Reliability is specific to the approach’s correctness and accuracy from a logical, mathematical, and statistical perspective. Another strength of this approach is that the selected leaders would be exceptional in most tasks related to their personal and work life. They would be the most admired leaders and would be the perfect example of how a leader should be. The major weakness of this leadership approach is that it would take a considerable amount of time to evaluate someone’s leadership ability and there would be less people to select from for the leadership role. Hence, the diversity in the leadership role would be less present. The distinction between the strengths and weaknesses of the integrative leadership approach is very narrow because the weakness shows the difficulty of being selected as a leader and being even greater of a leader from past well known leaders of all periods of time. Organizations use the integrative leadership approach during selection of managers and during creation of mission statements for the companies to make the most profit possible. The government uses the integrative leadership approach to study the leadership style of a particular leader. The technical industry uses the integrative approach to studying leadership before they hire their employees. They are the most talented employees and all of them are exceptional leaders.