Traits in the Leadership Process

Traits in the Leadership Process

Introduction

Almost every author that has researched and /or written about the leadership agrees that it is one of the most important s in organizational science . Hogan , Gordon and Hogan (2002 ) posit that in terms of the number of printed pages devoted to a subject , leadership ranks as one of the most important issues in applied psychology . In the same light , George (2002 ) argues that the of leadership has been addressed from a wide variety of dimensions , researchers have analyzed what leaders are like , what they

do or don 't do , how they motivate their followers , how their styles interact with situational conditions , how they effect changes in their organization and lots more . Despite this wide approach to leadership and huge body of knowledge accumulated over several decades of research , leadership still appears poorly understood This is evidenced by the lack of any standard definition

It is clear , however , that irrespective of the definition or dimension adopted , leadership can be described as the process of motivating encouraging or persuading people to drop their personal interests , for a period of time , and work towards the achievement of a collective goal Hogan , Gordon and Hogan (2002 ) assert that leadership is about persuasion and motivation and not domination . They opine that the process of leadership only occurs when individuals willingly adopt , for a period of time , the goals of a group as their own and work towards it achievement . It is apparent from the above that the person and personality of the leader plays pivotal role in the effectiveness and success of the leadership process . The importance of traits in the leadership process has been severally studied under various theoretical stance , be it the charismatic , transformational or servant leadership theories , what is important is that certain abilities , capacities and characteristics of the leader influences the leadership process . The purpose of this is to identify these characteristics and to highlight their importance in the leadership process

Traits and Leadership Defined

As said earlier , leadership is a that has to its credit countless research publications , magazine and news articles for example Morris and colleagues (2005 ) reported that a basic search of the word 'leader ' in the "ABI /Inform search engine yielded 388 ,122 documents 50 ,947 of which were in scholarly journals with the remaining appearing in magazines , trade publications , newss , and assorted reports (Morris et al , 2005

.1324 . Despite such huge volumes of academic and research work on the , the term leader and leadership still suffers from the problem of definition (Smith et al , 2004

Each author defines the base on his theoretical stance however some authors have attempted to provide a basic structural definition for the term leadership . In this regard , Lehman (2007 ) in his ZimNotes called leadership an influence process . He defines it as the 'ability to motivate others to do something , believe something or act a certain way , while Garner (2007 ) defines leadership as 'the ability to decide what is...