Contents

• Introduction
• Leadership today
• Transformational Leadership
• Transactional Leadership
• Effectiveness of the theories
• Conclusion
• References

Description

Leadership has evolved rapidly in the past 30-40 years. This is mainly due to the developments in understanding the interactions between people in the industry and the development of social theories. Leadership has become especially important in the modern world due to the development of flatter organizations and democracies. This increases the demands placed on a leader. Organizations have eliminated multiple levels of managers whereas democracies usually focus ultimate responsibility on a single person. Most notably, leadership has moved from the ‘great man’ theory to encompass a number of aspects. Closely related to this was the trait theory which had attracted a great deal of attention. However, this was followed by the process leadership theory since the importance to physical traits soon became irrelevant. More recently, on the other hand, the trait theory has made a comeback but now focuses on personality traits such as self – confidence, communicative ability, persuasiveness, etc. Such characteristic have also become more important to the managerial leader. Despite the area in which leadership is being applied, it is possible to learn a number of lessons with respect to its functioning and effectiveness. Therefore in the below sections, we examine two important leadership theories with respect to historic figures and attempt to determine their effectiveness (Topping, 2005).