Leaders V Managers

Sumeet Pradhan

Roll No.: 10532

EMBA

Assignment 1 – Article Critiquing

Understanding Leadership

And

Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?

The debate between leadership and management has been continued over a period of long time. Many-a-times people use leader and manger interchangeably and often associate leadership with a position. I feel that the distinction between management and leadership is useful one, in that it helps us gain a better understanding of leadership and causes us to reflect on our own behavior, asking ourselves, "Are we really leading or managing?" So, we will be able to mark the differences between managers and leaders and develop ourselves as required.

In the article “Understanding Leadership” the author has tried to make the readers understand leaders and highlight on the problems faced by them and how they need to address those problems. He also has identified the key skills required to be a leader. In the other article Zaleznik, the author has differentiated managers and leaders from various dimensions like personality, psychology, concept towards work, their relations with others and sense of self.

Prentice in his article have identified that the people studying leadership gets carried away to study popularity, power, showmanship or wisdom in long-range planning which are just traits of leaders. The author has defined leadership as, “the accomplishment of goal through the direction of human assistants.” And successful leader as one who can understand people’s motivational requirements and collaborate individual’s goal with group’s goal so that everyone participates foe the achievements of group goal. In distinguishing manager and leader personality, Zaleznik argues that managerial culture emphasized rationality and control and a manager is merely a problem solver. He further states that “it takes neither genius nor heroism to be a manager, but rather persistence, tough-mindedness, hard work, intelligence, analytical...