The Role of Leadership in Management
Management and leadership are strongly linked concept, both in the literature of management and in the popular imagination. A manager is by definition a person in charge: the boss. A leader is also the boss; and even more to the point, our deep-rooted mental notions of what being in charge ought to mean are bound up with exercising the qualities of leadership. In a typical formulation, "the thing that leaders do that managers don't is articulate an inspiring vision and guide the formulation of a strategy for its pursuit" (Allio 23). If we are managers ourselves, we would wish to articulate a vision and guide a formulation of strategy for attaining it. If we are subordinates, we hope for a manager who can do these things.
The following essay examines leadership and management in terms of the underlying attitudes they draw on, and how these have been expressed in the management literature. First, let us consider the origin and root meaning of the word "leadership." It derives from "leader," which in its most basic sense means literally to lead: to go first. The image evoked is of a group of people traveling along a path; the leader is the one who goes first, with the others following. The strong implication is that the leader is the person most familiar with the path, or at any rate who is most familiar with paths of this sort - the one who knows the way, or knows best how to determine the right way to go.
Our broader uses of leader and leadership all derive from this literal root meaning, and from its connotations. If someone is leading a group along a path, we infer that the others have chosen or accepted that person as best able to lead the way, able to recognize guideposts along the way, or recognize and deal with possible hazards. As followers, experience and intuition tell us what we expect in a leader.
In addition to having greater knowledge of the route, we want som...