Classical leadership - Essay Example

INTRODUCTION Leadership is a complex reality, hence, it can constitute a shifting enigma. Tolstoy's bow-wave metaphor suggests that the leaders are mere figureheads who are propelled by events beyond their control. The main issue then is whether the leaders really lead or if they are merely pulled by the events or situation they face everyday. This first section presents the idea that leadership cannot be taught. One is either a leader or not. Another important aspect is that leaders are in front of those they are leading. Grint presents a model that encompasses epistemologically and methodologically different perspectives on leadership. It is composed of four perspectives. The trait approach states that the essence of the individual leader is critical but the context is not. The contingency approach states that the essence and the context are both knowable and critical. The situational approach means that certain contexts demand certain kinds of leadership. This situation requires flexibility from the leaders. The constitutive approach, which stems from the constructivist theories in the social sciences suggests that what the situation and the leader actually are is a consequence of acts and interpretations. In the constitutive approach, the situation and the leader do not have essences. My personal opinion is that leadership is a key task. People demand from their leaders direction or vision, trustworthiness, and optimism. Like effective parents, good leaders make people hopeful. Warren Bennis (2001) emphasized the four competencies of leadership: technical competence, people skills, conceptual skills, judgment, and character. Bennis believes that effective leadership is primarily the function of one's character. I believe that these four leadership perspectives coincide with John Adair's approach on functional leadership. This approach suggests that leadership skills can be developed but that other qualities such as integrity and humility are essential to the makeup of an effective leader. CLASSICAL LEADERSHIP Classical Leadership was developed by four influential writers: Plato, Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, and Pareto. Plato primarily thought that the concept of a democratic society was problematic and so he developed a critique. He introduced the mob: the majority. He argued that the captain can be trusted because only he has the necessary knowledge. He was convinced that the subordinate groups should not be allowed to challenge the philosopher rulers, to ensure the safety of the 'ship'. The larger issue was not over whether leadership skills could be taught but what they were being taught for. Sun Tzu regarded the principle of one person, one job as crucial to success. His work, "Art of War" is a doctrine that does not glorify war but denounces those who seek it. The way of peace is always sought over violence but, when no option is left open, the violence is executed with the minimum effort and maximum effect. This philosophy generates a hierarchy of strategies which are premised on avoidance as the first strategy and face-to-face violence as the last. He believes that the best way to defeat an enemy is to foil the enemy's plots. He is keen for leaders to avoid being hated; he is aware that 'the goodwill' of the people is significant. Only by forging alliances with other princes and by the use of technology, and by disorganizing the competition, will the prince survive. Elites not 'the people' were a part of human society for Pareto. Pareto argues that human action is irrational and this is due to residues. Residues are prevalent and unchanging across space or time. The forms of elite control, are rooted in two oppositional forms of residues: Class I and Class II. These key writers showed us that leadership perspectives varied across time. Traditional Leadership Traditional leadership constitutes what Barnard identified within a triangle of elements that include the individual leader, the followers, and the conditions. Critical to his approach is the assumption that it is the integration of these three that generates leadership. Leaders also need a degree of technical competence. This is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. Intellectual capacity is something that leaders must have.Leaders also need to be decisive, persuasive, and responsible. Despite Barnard's attempt to instil some practical sense into leadership studies, it took Stogdill to undermine the desperate search for personal characteristics as predictors of leadership success. As Barnard would have expected, verbal fluency does correlate with leadership. The Stogdill piece tackled the Ohio State Leadership Studies which attempted to develop a set of objective methods by which leadership could be measured and evaluated. The Ohio approach required the separation of variables that could be measured accurately, and these embodied both formal and informal variables. The approach was especially interested in the differences between formal responsibility and formal interaction, on the one hand, and the informal elements of tasks actually performed and people that one actually interacted with, on the other. Leadership was essentially concerned with closing the gap between these divergent notions of what should happen and what did happen. Fiedler begins to develop his model based on two different forms of leadership behaviour: relationship-motivated leaders and task motivated leaders. Fielder's approach suggests the use of the Least Preferred Co-worker (LPC). The LPC approach asks leaders to describe the person they would least like to work with and the resultant data are tabulated to develop a model where task-motivated leaders perform best where the situation is one of either high or low control. Barnard's leadership views and Fielder's views are rooted in the task or person-oriented approach. MODERN LEADERSHIP Modern Leadership extends the focus of the previous traditional forms of leadership but takes in three of the new areas for research: democracy, cultural, and gender issues. Gastil claims that undemocratic leaders carry with them counterproductive edifices such as dependent and apathetic followers, low-quality policies and inefficient implementation.A democratic leader should ensure that every member has a level of competence. Culture has an impact on leadership. Hofstede's research argued that cultures could be divided by the significance of individualism, power-distance, uncertainty avoidance, and masculinity. Kakabadse et al. surmise that no general European style exists but four types exist. First there is the 'leading-from-the-front' approach of the British, Irish, and Spanish. This is rooted in the functioning of the leader and rests a pragmatic 'learn by doing' where rules are minimized. The second form, consensus, is a team-based approach with a preference for consensual decision-making. The third form, 'towards a common goal', has a similar end but a different means. The final form is labelled 'managing from a distance'. Kakabadse et al. argued that leadership in multinational teams demand that a system of disciplinary ground rules that needs to be agreed on. Bass and Avolio focused on the impact of gender on leadership. They suggest a positive light can be cast on male-stream organizations. Rosener states that women may be more nurturing and sensitive than men. This may be because of the different socialization that aligns men and women with different role models. I believe that there is a need to considered cross-cultural variations in leadership styles. There is also a need to study the ways to minimize the impact of the shattered glass ceiling that has kept women out of leadership positions in business. It is important to know the real reasons why women still remain trapped in non-leadership positions. Mythical Leadership The mythical leadership focused on the leadership styles of famous leaders. A foundation stone of this kind of leadership approach is that leaders, as most other things, live in our imaginations not in 'reality'. This refers to the fact that 'History is a set of lies agreed upon' (quoted in Peter 1978: 246). It is to suggest that we can never be certain of the real truth, since so much of what we know has to go through a sifting mechanism. That sifting is itself premised upon an interpretative process that subsequendy generates an account of the truth about a leader but not 'the' truth about a leader. We can only ever know a minimal amount about any leader, and the focus is on determining whose account is the most persuasive and why. Napoleon is known for his strategic genius. Napoleon succeeded by natural flair and by engendering high levels of emotional commitment. Wellington succeeded by hard work to ensure the logistics worked and by engendering respect from his troops but never emotional commitment. The conclusion is that a leader is a hero who upsets the status quo. Kets de Vries accepts that leaders do make a difference and that leaders must fulfil two roles if they are to be successful: first, they must fulfil a charismatic role. They must envision, energize, and empower. He is keen to suggest only where leaders empower their followers is there any chance of enacting the vision. The consequences of this 'myth' are self-perpetuating, because once the 'leader' has been recognized, all responsibility is projected onto him or her. This section deals with the impact of well-known leaders in history and their brand of leadership. I believe that it is possible that the leadership of famous heroes may be a product of well-spun fabrications. ALTERNATIVE LEADERSHIP The final approach, the Alternative Leadership wave, combines three recent developments in theoretical understandings of leadership.Hosking challenges us to consider whether our accounts of leadership are too static and assume an existence beyond us that reifies leaders and organizations. Lilley and Platt's account of Martin Luther King proceeds in a related direction by noting the diversity rather than the solidity of King's character and the role of followers in constructing such an unstable and variegated leadership image. Finally, and probably the most challenging of the readings, Calas and Smircich suggest that leadership embodies no definitive meanings and that multiple readings are potentially possible. Hosking displaced leadership as an issue of 'people' with leadership as an issue of 'process', and replacing 'organization' as a noun with 'organizing' as a verb. The consequence is that leadership becomes read as a skill involving social relationships, and organization becomes an entity not a condition. Hosking supports this claim by juxtaposing the traditional top-down idea of organization as an entity which exists independendy of its members, with a bottom-up idea of organizing as an achievement of its members.This leads Hosking to suggest that organizing is a unit of analysis not a concrete organization. This means that an effective leader is not someone who sits in a leadership position but someone who is skilled at leading. Hence, it is an active not a passive affair but it is not one restricted to face-to-face interpersonal skill nor is it restricted to a single actor's behaviour. I fully agree with Hosking's perspective on leadership. I also believe that a crucial skill for leaders is social networking in which leaders should act to persuade others about the nature of the subject but do not impede the flow of information, since this is important for the resolution of any problem. WORKS CITED PAGE Bennis, Warren, Thomas Cummings and Gretchen Speitzer. (2001). The Future of Leadership: Today's Top Leadership Thinkers Speak to Tomorrow's Leaders. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. O'Toole, James. (2001). In Warren Bennis, Thomas Cummings and Gretchen Speitzer (Eds), The Future of Leadership: Today's Top Leadership Thinkers Speak to Tomorrow's Leaders. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Read More