The Importance Of Leadership Effectiveness

Seemingly, there is much confusion surrounding the use of the concept leadership, especially when defining how the different types of leadership have influenced HRM. Preedy (1993:143) views leadership as the initiation of new structures or procedures for accomplishing an organization’s goals and objectives. If maintenance of goals and objectives is more important here, then this aspect can be favorably compared to the definition of management provided by Westhuizen, V. (1991:39). He defines management as the "accomplishment of desired objectives by establishing an environment favorable to performance by people operating in desired groups. Leadership can be defined as the ability to persuade others willingly to behave differently. Leadership

Bass and colleagues of his, have disputed that transactional leadership is a vital precondition if transformational leadership is to be effective (Avolio, 1999). By providing direction and focus, transactional leadership makes the use of transformational behaviors less confusing and ambiguous. From a somewhat abstract perspective, Podsakoff, Bommer and MacKenzie (2006) seem to agree with this assessment and further suggest that “leader reward and punishment behavior is the heart of what is called transactional leadership” (p.

The specific form of this relationship between supervisor behaviour and subordinate attribute can be stated as follows: “for subordinates of low-level maturity, superiors should show relatively lower consideration and higher task structuring; but as subordinates gain in maturity, task structuring should decrease, while considerateness should rise for mid-level subordinate maturity and then subsequently subside as subordinates achieve high-level maturity.” As stated by Thompson, G.