The Leadership Theory Of Leadership - 1502 Words

The leadership module is a very wide and dynamic one. There are several definitions for leadership as Stodgill (1974, p12) states. Seeman (1960, p3) defines leadership as the acts of a person which influence other people towards a shared direction. Influence is a vital aspect of leadership as the person who leads should have the charisma and the ability to influence others, otherwise leadership is non-existent. However that does not mean that leaders are better people than their followers. Hollander (1992, p7) explains that leaders and followers should be understood in relation to each other. Leaders and followers both have a mutual purpose and attention to common goals. For this reflection, we were assigned two presentations at the start†¦show more content†¦The group I was in was with Gary, Suwin and Matt, the same members from the previous term. Firstly, we looked pseudo-transformational leadership style. This leadership method is where leaders violate the ethical requirements of transformational leadership and the leaders have certain characteristics such as being self-consumed, exploitive and power orientated with values that they believed should be followed (Bass and Steidlmeier 1999). Bass and Steidlmeier (1999, p163) also suggest that leaders who adopt this method are more focused on their own interests rather than the interests of others. Barling et al. (2008), Christie et al. (2011), Eisenbeiß and Boerner (2013) and Kark et al. (2003) believe that pseudo-transformational leadership style exploit transformational behaviors to encourage their followers’ unconditional loyalty to and dependence on the leader. However none of us from the group believed that we should adopt this approach due to the unethical morals of this approach. Therefore we moved on to the next leadership style which was the transformational leadership. Downton (1973) was the one who came with this term. Transformational leadership is when the leader engages with others and helps to raise motivation and morality for both leader and followers. Burns (2003) explains that transformational leadership is related to morale development in 2 ways; the first way is when leaders incorporate 3