Managers as Leaders

Managers as Leaders

What is a leader? A leader is someone who can influence others and who has managerial authority (Robbins, 2009) and leadership is what leaders do. Leadership is a process of leading a group and influencing that group to achieve its goals. (Robbins, 2009) Leadership is a very interesting topic and passion of mine. I’ve always been told that I can be very influential and articulate with putting my thoughts into words. This has made me believe that I could be destined for a greater leadership role in my career and life than what most may expect of me. I hope to one day achieve a better understanding of what a leader’s role is in management activities and responsibilities, as well as, a manager’s ability to lead their teams. Leaders and leadership, like motivation, are organizational behavior topics (Robbins, 2009) that are researched so often and to the extent that behaviors of leaders are the center point in determining what are baseline attributes for an “effective” leader.

Trait theories are what research has led to be the believed immediately-noticed differences between potentially effective leaders and nonleaders. Physical stature, appearance, social class, emotional stability, fluency of speech and sociability were the traits studied most often. Despite the best efforts of researchers, it proved impossible to indentify a set of traits that would always differentiate a leader (the person_ from a nonleader (Robbins, 2009). However, later attempts to identify traits consistently associated with leadership (the process, not the person) were more successful (Robbins, 2009). The seven traits shown to lead to effective leadership are: Drive, Desire to Lead, Honesty and Integrity, Self-Confidence, Intelligence, Job-related Knowledge, and Extraversion (Wikipedia, 2008).

Behavioral theories are leadership theories that identify behaviors that differentiate effective leaders from ineffective leaders (Robbins, 2009). There are four main leaders in...