Ldr 531 - Leadership Approach Paper

Leadership Approach Paper

Charrisse Summerall

LDR/531

May 31, 2011

Tracey A. Walker

Leadership Approach Paper

A good leader is a person that knows when and how to follow. Meaning he or she surrounds themselves with people of expertise. In this paper there will be an overview of a major research approach to leadership. The paper will include the approaches strengths and weaknesses. One way to compensate for weaknesses is to select subordinates who have complementary strengths and allow them to assume responsibility for aspects of the work they are more qualified to perform. Sometimes it is suitable to delegate to capable individuals, and other times it is good to have a management team share the responsibility for a specific problem or challenge (Yukl, 2010). The paper will also, provide an example in which this leadership approach was used in an organization.

Power-influence research examines influence processes between leaders and other people. Like most research on traits and behavior, some of the power-influence research takes a leader-centered perspective with an implied assumption that causality is moving were leaders act and followers react. This research seeks to explain leadership effectiveness in terms of the amount and type of power controlled by a leader and how power is exercised. Power is viewed as important not only for influencing subordinates, but also for influencing peers, superiors, and people outside the organization, such as clients and suppliers. The favorite methodology has been the use of survey questionnaires to relate leader power to various measures of leadership effectiveness (Yukl, 2010).

Many may look at power influenced leadership and think it should be a thing of the past in its ideology however, look at it as a way to keep things in a proper order. As stated earlier a good leader surrounds him or her with good subordinates. The leader and the subordinates are a team working towards a common goal. The leader ask for advice from his subordinates in regards to a business task however the final say will ultimately be the leaders.

The power-influence research approach uses questionnaires and descriptive incidents to decide how leaders sway the attitudes and behavior of followers. The responses to the questionnaires are study of influence tactics can be viewed as a bridge linking the power-influence approach and the behavior approach. The use of different influence tactics is compared in terms of their relative effectiveness for getting people to do what the leader wants (Yukl, 2010).

Participative leadership deals with power sharing and empowerment of followers, and it is firmly rooted in the tradition of behavior research as well. Many studies used questionnaires to correlate subordinate perceptions of participative leadership with criteria of leadership effectiveness such