What Is Rational Leadership?

Leadership is a well researched area in social sciences and management sciences. One of the most renowned definitions of leadership includes the definition by Locke (1991) in which he argued that leadership is the ability to include other people in decision making process. This reflects that leaderships is inclined to relations. This is something different from management. Managers tend to solve the problem immediately whereas; a leader will try to understand the problem fully before taking any decision about its resolution.

Weber had rightly identified three different types of leadership that is; traditional, rational, and charismatic leadership. Rational leadership is developed when people choose their leader through logic decision making, traditional leadership runs in family and charismatic leadership is when people choose their leaders on basis of their charismatic personality and broad vision about future of people. A charismatic leader always involves local people and community in his decision making whereas; this element is least

An authoritarian leader does the entire decision making on his own and only informs the subordinates about his decisions. Democratic leader is the one who includes all subordinates in decision making and consider their recommendations (Harris, 2004).

On functional level, author has made distinction production oriented and relationship oriented leadership. Production oriented leadership is in which leaders are more interested about the production of their organization whereas; some of the leaders are more relationship oriented in which they tend to focus on their relationships with their subordinates. The research further shows that those leaders are more successful in their practical settings who are relationships oriented because they are able to closely recognize the needs of their subordinates which leads to even a better production of the