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Leadership, Past, Present and Future

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Leadership: Past, Present, and
Future

Mostafa El Abd
20/03/2015
GMBA-EN-BF
September 2014 Intake

Leadership is significant in both social and organisational functioning. It has a broad meaning and has been defined in many ways over the centuries. Most leadership scholars agree that the term leadership can be described as an influencing procedure and its consequential outcomes which mainly occur between a leader and his or her followers, as well as how this process can be made clear by the leader’s dispositional behaviours and attributes, follower perception, and the framework in which this influencing process or method occurs. The term leadership is often paired with power and management but the definition of leadership should be kept different from both of these terms.
Leadership research over the years can be classified into nine major schools starting from the 1900s till 2010s. They are: Trait, Behavioural, Contingency, Contextual, Skeptics, Relational,
New leadership, Information-processing and Biological/Evolutionary.
1. Trait School of Leadership: This research started in the 20th century and suggests that specific dispositional attributes differentiate leaders from non-leaders or common people.
2. Behavioural School of Leadership: This school of research began in the 1950s and focused on the behavioural approach towards leadership. Meaning, behaviours that were enacted by the leaders and how they took care of their followers were the focus of this research.
3. Contingency School of Leadership: This line of research is mostly Fiedler’s credit who said that leader-member relations, structure of the task and the position power of the leader decide the efficiency of the nature of leadership exercised.
4. Relational School of Leadership: This research was mainly based on leader-member exchange theory, otherwise known as LMX theory. This theory defines the type

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