Leadership Trait Theory

‘Leadership’ and ‘Management’ are two commonly using words in nowadays organizations. The essential and integral part of productive management is leadership. Effective leadership is crucial to an organization’s success. Leaders can take a quantity of different steps to help keep projects from failing. The main and highly important focus of the leader is to make things happen. According to Griffin (2008), ‘Leadership, as a process, the use of non coercive influence to shape the group’s or organization’s goals, motivate behaviour toward the achievement of those goals, and help define group or organizational culture; as a property, the set of characteristics attributed to individuals who are perceived to be leaders’. Equally as management, that

Trait theory based on research that was focused on identifying specific physical characteristics as well as personal attributes that may be associated with leader effectiveness. Stogdill (1974) analyzed and synthesized 287 studies on leadership traits conducted between 1904 and 1970 and identified several characteristics associated with effective leaders. These included: good interpersonal skills; self-confidence and achievement-orientation; persistence in the pursuit of goals; ability to cope with interpersonal stress and tolerate frustration; ability to engage in creative problem solving. Trait studies showed that other characteristics that distinguish good from poor leaders included integrity and honesty, a desire to lead and job- related knowledge. Moreover, there has been an increasing focus on identifying the relationships between leadership and the Big Five model of personality. Transactional or transformational theory, focus on leader vision and ability to inspire followers (transformational); leader clarifies performance criteria and ‘rewards’ subordinates for meeting performance expectations (transactional). Path-goal theory focuses on the way that leaders’ behaviours can influence subordinate performance and satisfaction. It draws upon the expectancy theory of motivation to explain a leader’s impact on subordinates. Even though, whatever the theory, there are common aspects. Result of two factors, leadership style and situational favourability, straightly define success of a group. First, depends on the multiple factors such as: character, ethnicity, social background, education, experience, and culture. Inconsiderable of these factors, it seems the leadership approaches have been segregated in to two broad groups: relationship oriented, and task oriented. Second, depends on: leader-follower relations, task structure, and the position