Emerging Approaches to Leadership

Leadership is a term that conjures up different images in different people while to some it means charisma, to other, it means power and authority. Leadership skills emerge out of spontaneity and contagion needs, spontaneity refers to the need for initiating a wide range of activities or creating opportunities for other with a view to influence people. In contracts, people with contagion needs are influenced by others and will develop leadership skills. In fact, effective leadership is the mixture of both needs.

Leadership thus, plays a crucial role in organizational dynamics. It fill many of the voids left in conventional organization design, allows for greater organizational flexibilities and responsiveness to environmental changes, provides a way to coordinate the effort of diverse groups within the organization, and facilitates organizational membership and personal needs satisfaction. It is the quality of managerial leadership that often differentiates effective from ineffective organizations. Therefore, rational leader should know different emerging approach of the leadership and also they should be aware of current issue in leadership.

There are different approaches emerging in the field of leadership. Some of them are:

1. Attribution theory of leadership: It deals with people trying to make sense out of cause-effect relationships. When something happens, they want to attributes it to something. This theory tells that leadership is merely an attribution that people make about other individuals. Effective leaders are generally considered consistent or unwavering in their decisions. 
2. Charismatic leadership theory: Followers make attributions of heroic or extraordinary abilities when they observe certain behaviors. Some examples of charismatic leaders are John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr. Walt Disney, Ted Turner, Barack Obama etc. They are found to have extremely high confidence, dominance and strong convictions in his or her beliefs.
3. Transactional or transformational leadership: Transactional leaders guide or motive their followers in the direction of established goals and clarifying role and task requirements. Transactional leader, on the other hand, inspired followers to transcend their own self-interests for the good of the organization, and they are capable of having a profound and extraordinary effect on his or her followers. Transformational leadership is about leading, changing the organizations strategies and culture so that they have a better bit with the surrounding environment. They are change agents who energies employees and direct them to a new set of corporate values and behaviors.
4. Visionary leadership: The ability to create and articulate a realistic, credible, attractive vision of the future for an organization unit that grows out of and improves upon the present. This vision, if properly selected and implemented, is so energizing that leads to great success of the organization. A vision has clear and compelling imagery that offer an innovative way to improve, which recognizes and draws on traditions, and connects to action that people can take to realize change. Vision taps people’s emotions and energy, properly articulated a vision creates the enthusiasm that people have for sporting events and other leisure time activities, binging the energy and commitment to the workplace.