Effective Leadership in Organizations

Introduction

There are almost as many definitions of leadership as there are persons who have attempted to define leadership (Stogdill, 1974). Therefore, it is very difficult to understand what leadership actually is. According to John Sculley leadership revolves around vision and ideas and has to do more with inspiring people towards direction and goal. A leader is a person capable of inspiring other people to do things without sitting on top of them with a checklist. Precisely, leadership is a process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a desired goal (Northouse, 2012). Distinguishing between leaders and non-leaders is hard as there exists no clear understanding of what differentiates leaders from non-leaders. Leadership and authority are constructed socially by superiors and subordinates, followers and peers.

Leaders work on the frontier where tomorrow is taking shape, they serve as guides to the things in the present and as the things are going to be in future. Leaders are different from one another in terms of age, occupation, accomplishments, background etc. but they all agree in two things:

1. They agree that leaders are made by themselves than by any other means i.e. they are made not born.

2. A leader has the ability to express himself fully and freely.

Effective leadership

An effective leader is a person who is capable of making others follow him. A person who leads people becomes a leader. The quality of life of followers depends upon the quality of leader they have, so, it becomes important for a leader to be effective. Leaders possess certain traits that can be defined as relatively coherent and integrated patterns of personal characteristics, reflecting a range of individual differe...

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