Leadership Paper

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the leadership behaviors noted in the movie Stand and Deliver. This movie was about a teacher who stood up to the school administration, his family, and the community to help a group of underprivileged, mostly Spanish children, from an LA ghetto excel in mathematics. Eventually his teaching program had the teenagers passing AP calculus. Despite officials stating the students cheated, hostile students, an unorganized and underfunded school, and a school staff who was not motivated to aid in his cause, somehow this teacher rose above normal expectations and began a program that eventually changed lives. Two examples of his dedication to exceed in spite of pitfalls was noted in several examples throughout the movie. The first example was when he went into a hostile classroom and got bombarded with rude comments and flying debris aimed at him from the classroom pranksters. Another example was when he was looking through a stack of torn books to give to a student. The third example was when he thought he was going to teach computers and found out there were no computers at this school. This showed how difficult the obstacles were going to be to overcome at this school.

The first type of leadership that will be discussed is the trait theory of leadership. This type of leadership has been proclaimed obsolete by itself in determining leadership ability. According to Bass(2008) this type of leadership began to lose ground in the 1940's. This leadership theory has been making a comeback in the last few years however. According to Kirkpatrick and Locke(1991) leaders possess certain core traits that are noted in successful leaders. It has been made rather clear that great leaders are different than other people and also feature different traits. The teacher in this movie was a prime example of this. This leader demonstrated self-confidence, stamina, motivation, courage, skills, and excellent performance in his role as the leader...