about what constitutes a leader, about the differences between leaders and managers, if any, and about what the ends or goals of the leader actually should be. This is not a field with great uniformity of thinking.
In the beginning, the major focus in leadership theory was on the specific traits that leaders were presumed to possess which separated them out from ordinary people and made them leaders. Supporters of this theory believe that leaders have special qualities or characteristics that make them leaders in most situations in which they are placed. However, trait theories of leadership were supplanted by other more complex, and seemingly more accurate theories of leadership that took other factors into account.
Still, there have been some generalities made about traits or characteristics that tend to be more common to leaders. Stogdill (Bass 66) categorized these under several headings, including capacity, achievement, responsibility, participation, status, and situation. This was further expanded into finding the leader as generally characterized by a strong drive for responsibility and task completion, persistence, in pursuit of goals, drive to exercise initative, self-confidence, ability to absorb interpersonal stress and tolerate frustration and delay, ability to influence other people, and the capacity to structure situations and systems toward task completion and goals (Bass 81).
Transactional approaches, on the other hand, focus more on leadership style or how leaders relate to their followers or employees. Basically, transactional approaches emphasized a few specific styles which were considered to be authoritarian, democratic, or laissez-faire in their basic mode.
The authoritarian approach is just what it sounds like. The authoritarian leader relates to employees as a dictator relates to citizens. Orders are given and the leader expects that they will be followed exactly. Challenges are not wel...