Leadership Approach

Leadership Approach

There is an underlying assumption about the meaning of leadership. Leadership can be defined in many ways, thereby creating an ambiguity of the word and its meaning. Leadership is often confused with authority, dominance, power, or control. Leadership has been a topic of speculation for many years, but it was not researched until the twentieth century. An attempt to understand research approaches used to study leadership, along with the strengths and weaknesses will help to give a clearer understanding of leadership.

Research Approach

There are five research approaches reviewed in the Leadership in Organizations, Seventh Edition (2010), Trait approach, Behavior approach, power-influence approach, situational approach, and integrative approach.

The trait approach is unlike the other approaches in that it focuses on the leader's characteristics such as confidence, intelligence, personality, values, and motives; it does not put any emphasis on the followers. The trait approach was one of the first approaches studied. The trait approach gives the idea that some people are naturally born to be a leader. Former theories credited success to the leader's tireless energy, irresistible persuasive powers, penetrating intuition, and uncanny foresight. It implies that companies will operate better if the employees in leadership positions have specific profiles and by employing specific employees will help increase the company's effectiveness. The trait approach gives the leader an opportunity to understand his or her strengths and weaknesses.

Strengths

The trait approach has numerous strengths that make it appealing to organizations. First, one strength is it gives the opinion that leaders are intelligence, motivated, and hard- working. Another trait approach strength is it has years of research to validate it. It is the most researched approach giving it a degree of creditability other approaches do not have. Third, the trait approach gives the characteristics or traits, potential leaders need to look for. There are researched characteristics that leaders have with the trait approach potential leaders can use to these characteristics to make improvements to his or her skills to advance in the workplace.

Naturally if the trait approach has strengths it stands to reason it would also have weaknesses. A weakness of the trait approach is there is no way to take a certain circumstance or situation into account. Traits that make a person a leader in one circumstance may not make him or her a leader in a different circumstance. Different situations make people react in different ways. Another weakness for the trait approach is the amount of leadership traits, which makes it impossible to master all the traits. Last, the trait approach is often criticized because it