Leadership And Stodgil's Theory Of Leadership

Leadership is defined by Armstrong (2012) as a process of inspiring people to do their best in order to achieve the desired result, this involves developing and communicating a vision for the future, motivating people and securing their engagement. So, the efficiency in resources mobilization, allocation, utilization and enhancement of organizational performance depends to a large extent on leadership styles, among other factors (Obiwuru et al., 2011). A leadership style refers to a specific manners applied by a leader to motivate his or her subordinates to accomplish the objectives of the organization. Okumbe (1998) founding on leadership conducted at the University of Iowa USA in 1993 investigated the impact of the three common leadership

The most the common aspect of this theory are that successful leaders all over the world and all over history are born with essential qualities such as personality traits, social traits, ability traits and physical traits. Stodgil (1948) sketches eight traits namely intelligence, alertness, insight, responsibility, initiative, persistence, self-confidence and sociability in his first investigation. The theory is very useful to differentiate the leaders from followers, effective from ineffective leaders and the higher class from the lower class leaders. The theory focuses exclusively on the role of the leader in leadership and hence has been able to provide a deeper and more intricate understanding of how the leader and his or her personality are related to the leadership process (Mat, 2008). However, Trait theory is criticized for the various reasons. The most substantial problem is that even though for decades numerous research on trait theory has been conducted, there is no standard list of traits introduced which can be used to define the leadership effectiveness. The second failure is the inability of the trait theory to limit itself to a list of traits. Thirdly, it is linked to the assumption that a leader is born, if a person has certain traits, he is a leader. In this theory, the determination of leadership effectiveness is solely dependent on the list of trait and not on the situation. This makes it difficult to predict leadership effectiveness based on the pre-defined list of traits in different situations (Mat, 2008). Northouse (2013) states that unsuitable leadership styles can directly affect the performance and retention of workers in modern organizations. Industrial practitioners have long recognized the substantial role of employees in the realization of organizational goals. In an attempt to achieve these goals, organizational managers strive to develop,