Leaders Are Born or Made?

1. Critically discuss the contention that “leaders are born not made”

Firstly, leadership involves with many factors which need to be addressed in order to illustrate the portrait of a leader.

Exhibit 1: What leadership involves

Source: (Daft, 2002, p. 5)

According to Thomas Edison, to be a genius, 1 percent of inspiration and 99 percent of perspiration and in my opinion, to be a leader is as same as genius. Because no one ever achieves great success just based on their talent alone, their right effort will be essential factor affecting to their successes.

Leader is defined as a person who is responsible for leading their followers towards accomplishing a shared vision. Importantly, a leader initially creates a vision for their corporate and build up an effective team to put all efforts for vision. A great team will always be encouraged, allowed and facilitated to achieve the optimum performance, in relation to the corporate mission and needs.

According to Richard L. Daft, a successful leader depends on personal characteristics. People become leaders because they have the inherent qualities and inborn abilities to be leaders. The important characteristics are generally required as self confidence, honesty and integrity and drive. In short, a potential leader can be characterized with these qualities, but these take a little account for the context in which leadership is exercised.

This is also the first step to recognize a potential leader. Moreover, as mentioned in the behaviour theory, leadership is not a set of traits, but a set of behaviors. A good leader is a person who can adopt the appropriate behaviour in different circumstances to encourage followers to achieve the target. Behaviours can be learned more than traits and making leadership to be accessible to all.

The leader must be flexible and dynamic, and use varying leadership styles for a given challenge. In this case, different situations call for different personality characteristics...