Principle of Management

Group Assisgnment

Sajjala |

Sahare Alam |

Vivek singh |

Ganesh Acharya |

Shiney Mathews |

Rangraj Deepshika |

Damodar Chilvery |

Mahesh Talwaltkar |

Smitesh V |

Trait theories of Leadership

Leadership

The process of influencing employees to work toward the achievement of organizational objectives

Trait theory

It's main idea is that leaders have certain traits that makes them leaders. For example Churchill is a 'persistent' leader when fighting against the Nazis or Mandela is 'visionary' leader about the black civil rights. So the raitionale goes that leadership can be identified or even defined if individuals exhibits these so called leadership traits

he reached the conclusion that there is no single set of universal traits that is predictative of leadership

In another word, we couldnt possibly predict if anyone is going to grow up to become a leader by testing if he has got all the leadership traits (presumably through psychological assessment) because there is nothing to benchmark him against. The second important conclusion is that leadership arise from a need for it (situation) and it invovles interaction with other people. All these suggests trait theory cannot be the only way to study leadership. Fortunately, after a period where it was almost discarded , recent research have shown traits theory is important for understanding effective leadership (Northhouse 2004). There are still a set of traits that are consistently found in leaders such as intelligence, determination, integrity, sociability, and self confidence (Northouse 2004). Nevertheless,

one major limit of trait theory is that it is impossible to see how traits such as intelligence and determination can bring about influence in other people's motivation and performance

The trait model of leadership is based on the characteristics of many leaders - both successful and unsuccessful - and is used to predict leadership effectiveness. The resulting lists of traits are then compared to those...