This is an article written by Professor Robin Stuart-Kotze - The Leadership Theory guru.
This is a somewhat personal note. In some sense it is a reminiscence of my life in the field of leadership and of some of the interesting people I have been fortunate to have met, known and be friends with. It will give you the context of my Momentum Radar model – how it was developed and where it sits in the world of leadership models and diagnostics. It all began when I met Bill Reddin in 1967 and began working with him a couple of years later. He was my great mentor and friend and he got me started on my lifelong interest in leadership.
In this note I have stuck to talking about leadership models that are applicable and practical and have omitted any of the more academic stuff like Vroom and Yetton’s Leader Participation Model, Path-Goal theory and some of the more esoteric things written about leadership. That reflects my bias. I am only interested in things that can be made to work easily and simply and that address observable behaviour. (However if you are interested in some of the more academic approaches but don’t want a heavy treatment you can look at Management, Robbins and Stuart-Kotze, Prentice Hall, any edition – it’s currently in its 7th.)Early leadership theoriesDiscussions about management style have been going on since antiquity. Confucius, in about 500 BC, travelled around China trying to persuade the various feudal kings that he had the formula for effective leadership. His view was that one simply had to be benevolent, humane, just and moderate and all would work well. About 200 years later the first Emperor of China, Ch’in Shih Huang Ti, made his opinion about this formula pretty clear by having 460 Confucian monks buried alive or buried up to their necks and decapitated.
The Trait Approach
Early twentieth century writing and thinking on leadership was based on what one might call "The Great Man Theory." The idea was that if one studied the lives of great leaders one should be able to identify the qualities that differentiated them from ordinary people. This resulted in long lists of characteristics like energy, intelligence, articulacy, assertiveness, determination, focus, etc, etc. The underlying assumption was that leaders were born, not made.People with nothing better to do still try to argue this issue despite the fact that we know that leadership, like pretty well all behaviour, is learned. There are still large numbers of people, many occupational psychologists among them, who claim that there are a number of specific traits which define effective leaders. Unfortunately for them, extensive and definitive research by R. M. Stogdill in 1948, extended and revisited 25 years later, proved without any doubt that there is no set of traits that universally defines effective leadership. Instead Stogdill concluded:
“the qualities, characteristics, and skills required in a leader are determined to a large extent by the demands of the situation in which he is to function as a leader.”
(Apparently, Stogdill’s Handbook of Leadership listed over 4,000 studies of leadership. His conclusion was that "the endless accumulation of empirical data has not produced an integrated understanding of leadership." ed.)
Remember the word situation as we go through the sequence of major management/leadership models since then
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