Effective Leadership

Effective Leadership

Effective Leadership

Being a broad term, leadership has drawn scholarly interest leading to a controversy in settling on a definite definition. Gerhard (2005) defined it as a process of social influence whereby an individual helps a group through ideas to work together towards achieving a common goal. Defining leadership as a process, as Gerhard does, therefore, shows that it is not a quality or trait residing in the leaders, but rather a transactional event that occurs between the leaders and those they lead. It emphasizes that leadership is not a linear one-way event, but rather an interactive event. This definition makes leadership accessible to everyone since it does not restrict it to the formally designated leaders in a group. Effective leadership is hard to realize. Although it is possible to give an unending list of leaders, this paper proves that a limited number of these many leaders eventually realize effective leadership.

Effective leadership has been the focus of many of the individuals enlisted as leaders. However, John and Joseph (2009) collected data and their statistics shows that less than 30% of the leaders realize this long-term goal. It involves influence, as its principal concern is how the leader affects followers. Influence is the sine qua non of leadership, without which leadership does not exist. Groups are the context through which leadership takes place. Leaders engage themselves in influencing individuals in a group to a particular common purpose (Minja, 2009). The group in question can be a small task group, a community group, a faith based group or a large group encompassing an entire organization. Therefore, defining leadership as a process does not encompass training programmes, which teach people to lead themselves since the group aspect in leadership does not exist.

Leadership can be categorized either as good or bad. Of all management concepts, good leadership is the most investigated but least...