Management - Vikhanskiy OS

2. Traditional concepts of leadership

Despite the fact that leaders and leadership always have a significant influence on the course of development of world history, careful study of them, as already noted above, began about a century ago. Early studies suggested that in any situation, a leader must have certain qualities. Somewhat later, the study shifted toward identifying patterns of behavior leader.

2.1. The theory of leadership qualities

The theory of leadership qualities is the earliest approach in the study and explanation of leadership. The first researchers tried to identify those qualities that distinguish "great people" in history from the masses. Researchers believed that the leaders had some unique set of fairly stable and unchanging qualities that distinguished them from non-leaders. Based on this approach, scientists tried to identify leadership qualities, learn to measure them and use them to identify leaders. This approach was based on the belief that leaders are born, not become.

In this direction, hundreds of studies were conducted, which gave rise to an extremely long list of identified leadership qualities. Ralph Stogdill in 1948 and Richard Mann in 1959 attempted to generalize and group all previously identified leadership qualities. So, Stogdill came to the conclusion that basically five qualities characterize the leader [17]:

• the mind or intellectual abilities;

• domination or predominance over others;

• self-confidence;

• activity and energy;

• knowledge of the case.

However, these five qualities did not explain the appearance of the leader. Many people with these qualities remained followers. Manna suffered a similar disappointment [13]. Among the seven personal qualities of the leader, which he revealed, the mind was the best predictor that his owner would be the leader. However, the practice did not confirm this. Despite this, the study of leadership qualities was continued until the mid-80's. The most interesting result was obtained by the famous American consultant Warren Bennis, who investigated 90 successful leaders and determined the following four groups of leadership qualities:

• Attention management, or the ability to so represent the essence of the result or outcome, the purpose or direction of the movement / action, so that it is attractive to followers;

Managing a value, or the ability to convey the value of a created image, idea, or vision so that they are understood and accepted by followers;

management of trust, or the ability to build their activities with such consistency and consistency in order to gain the full trust of subordinates;

self-management, or the ability to know and recognize your strengths and weaknesses so well in time to skillfully draw on other resources, including the resources of others, to strengthen your weaknesses.

Bennis offers leaders the power to share in the organization to create an environment in which people feel the importance and the opportunity to know what they are doing, and also that they are part of this common cause. The organizational environment created in this way should instill in people strength and energy through quality of work and dedication to work. Subsequent study led to the identification of four groups of leadership qualities: physiological, psychological, or emotional, mental, or intellectual, and personal business (Table 11.2).

Table 11.2.

Leadership qualities, most often

Intellectual abilities

Character traits of personality

Acquired skills

• Mind and logic

• Initiative

• Ability to enlist

Support of

• Judgment

• Flexibility

• Ability to cooperate

• Insight

• Vigilance

• Ability to conquer

Popularity and prestige

• Originality

• Creativity

And creativity

• Tact and diplomacy

• Conceptuality

• Honesty

• Ability to take on

Risk and responsibility

• Education

• Personal integrity

• Ability to organize

• Knowledge of the case

• Courage

• Ability to persuade

• Speech development

• Self-confidence

• Ability to change yourself

• Curiosity and cognition

• Balancing

• Ability to be reliable

• Intuitive

• Independence

• Self-reliance

• Ambitiousness

• Need for achievements

• Perseverance and perseverance

• Vigorous

• Authority

• Performance

• Aggressiveness

• Striving for excellence

• Compulsory

• Happiness

• Ability to joke and understand humor

• Ability to understand people

Successful leaders

To physiological include such qualities of a person as height, weight, build or shape, appearance or representativeness, energy of movements and state of health. Of course, to some extent there can be a connection between the availability of these qualities and leadership. However, being physically taller and larger than the average person in the group does not yet give any right to be a leader in it. Examples of Napoleon, Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Gandhi confirm the fact that individuals with deviations in the smaller side can grow to the size of very influential figures in world history. Those who still believe in the priority of physiological qualities rely heavily on the use of force in occupying a leadership position, which, as already noted, is not characteristic of effective leadership.

Psychological, or emotional, qualities are manifested in practice mainly through the character of a person. They have both hereditary and educational foundations. The study of their relationship with leadership led to the appearance of a very long list of these qualities. Most of them have not been confirmed by the practice of their connection with leadership. This allows us to conclude that the situation is not so simple and that it is impossible to fully and directly rely on the data presented in Table. 11.2 personality traits when identifying a leader in an organization.

The study of intellectual or intellectual qualities and their connection with leadership was conducted by many scientists, and in general their results coincide in the fact that the level of these qualities among leaders is higher than that of non-leaders. Apparently, this led to the fact that the success of a leader largely depends on his abilities and ability to solve problems and make the right decisions. Effective performance of these functions, as is known, is due to the presence of the abilities in question. However, subsequent studies have shown that the correlation between these qualities and leadership is rather small. So, if the average intellectual level of followers is low, then being too smart for a leader means facing many problems.

Personal business qualities are more of a character acquired and developed by the leader skills and abilities in the performance of their functions. Their importance for success increases in the levels of the organizational hierarchy. However, accurate measurement is difficult. It has not yet been possible to prove that these qualities are decisive for effective leadership. For example, business qualities that have made someone a leader in a commercial bank are unlikely to be useful for leadership in a research laboratory or in a theater.

The theory of leadership qualities suffers from a number of shortcomings. First, the list of potentially important leadership qualities turned out to be almost endless. For this reason, it became impossible to create the "only true" image of the leader, and therefore, lay some foundations of the theory.

Secondly, for various reasons, such as, for example, failure to find ways to measure many leadership qualities, and also because of the non-recognition of possible differences depending on the organization or situation, it was not possible to establish a close relationship between the qualities and leadership considered and to help the practical identification The latter.

Summarizing the above, it can be concluded that the approach that studies leadership qualities is undoubtedly interesting, but, unfortunately, has not yet brought benefits to practice. However, it served as an impetus for the emergence and development of other leadership concepts and proved to be a reliable deterrent in reassessing the behavioral and situational foundations of leadership.