Leadership in Organizations

A wide divergency of opinion exists as to exactly what leadership in organizations is. Peter Drucker (1955) said that leadership is of the utmost importance to an organization, andthat it cannot be created, promoted, taught or learned. He viewed leadership as an art, as opposed to a science. Bradford Boyd (1968) held that that leadership is, simply, getting people to work to achieve the goals of the organization; givingthem an attainable objective. Unlike Drucker, he tended to view leadership more as a science; something that can be taught and learned. Sven Lundstedt (1975) more or less agreed with Boyd, when he said that leadership is the ability to influence the behavior of others in a group, set up goals for a group, formulate paths to the goals, and create some social norms in the group. James MacGregor Burns (1978) defined leadership as

1 2the practice of inducing followers to act for certain goals that represent the the wants, needs, aspirations, and expectations of both leaders and followers. Burns (1978) did not consider effective leadership to be synomous with naked power wieldin

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consider leadership styles, personalities, and organizational requirements (Lenz, and Engledow, 1986). First, in the context of organizational conflict which often develops at the time of change implementation, the decisionmaking behaviors of managers and administrators significantly affect the development of such conflict, and these decisionmaking behaviors are products of the leadership styles of the administrators and managers (Schilit, and Paine, 1987). Second, specific approaches to decisionmaking will often be shunned, in those situations where the decisionmaking procedure conflicts with the 4cognitive perspectives of decisionmakers themselves (Schwenk, 1988). Leadership style will vary between the extremes of task and relationships orientations, between authoritarian leader ship and participative management, and between directive leadership and group decisionmaking. The manager or administrator who is completely task oriented will likely make change implementation decisions which are geared to getting the job done. Such decisions will tend to concentrate on the economic use of material and human resources, regardless of sociopsychological impact such decisions may have on the individual members of an o
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Approximate Word count = 1634
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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