Leadership:
• Why choose leadership?
A quote from beginning of Lock’s (1991) book on leadership: ‘There probably has never been a society, country, or organisation that did not have a leader; if there has, it probably did not survive for long.’ The assumption under the quote is that leaders are indispensable elements of an effective organisation. Nowadays, leadership seems to be increasingly challenging because of the pace of change, the illusion of control and the high expectations of followers (John, 2005). In line with that, demands on leaders are changing in their nature and also increasing (Dess and Picken, 2000). Leadership based upon monitoring and control of subordinates is no longer appropriate (John, 2005). Meindl (1990) also argued that leadership is more a creation in the minds of followers than a characteristic of those who occupy leadership roles. It implies that the real leader of a group may not be the person who was formally appointed to the role (John, 2005). So, a leader can be defined as the ‘person who is appointed, elected, or informally chosen to direct and co-ordinate the work of others in a group’ (Fiedler, 1995, p. 7). Another crucial distinction between two types of leader roles is said by Sir Adrian Cadbury (1999), the former head of Cadbury Schweppes, that ‘good leaders grow the people below them, bas leaders stunt them; good leaders serve their follows, bad leaders enslave them’ (P. Dick and S. Ellis, 2006). There are many other definitions explaining and reflecting different dimensions of leadership, but one thing they all agree is that leadership is such a critical activity in workplaces that can sometimes determine whether or not the organisation will success. That is also the reason why I choose this topic here.
• A Trait Theory of Leadership
Many researchers tried to identify the personality traits of leaders by analysing some