The purpose of this research is to provide an overview of leadership in organizations, and of the relationship between leadership and decision making. Leadership, as a concept, is considered first, and this discussion is followed by a brief exploration of the relationship between organizational leader ship and decision making.
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 peo ple 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 expecta tions of both leaders and followers. Burns (1978) did not con sider effective leadership to be synomous with naked power wielding. Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman, Jr. (1982, p. 93) provided a definition of leadership which stripped the concept of any semblence of art, when they said that leadership
. . . is many things. It is patient . . . boring coalition building . . . the purposefulseeding of
cabals that . . . willresult in the appropriate fer
ment in the bowels of the organization . . . meticu
lously shifting the . . . institution through the mundane language of management systems . . . alter...