Literature Review of Leadership

In his genre-defining book titled “Leadership”, James MacGregor Burns made striking mentions of ‘qualities of leaders’ and since then i.e., for past few decades, it is being discussed and understood that a leader’s qualities and his character will make a greater difference to his effectiveness. According to Burns, civilization depends on ‘transforming leaders’ i.e., not only problem solvers but those who could help the society to a higher level of morality and motivation. Some writers on Leadership say that leaders are those who not only ‘do things right’ but are also seen ‘to do the right thing’. In that case, which type of leaders would necessarily be counted on for doing the right thing? Lee Iacocca who is a domineering charismatic battler; Highly performance oriented ruthless leaders like Jack Welch; Proponents of ‘Servant Leadership ‘styles like Max De Pree of Herman Miller; Darwin Smith, CEO Kimberly- Clark who is a quiet stoic and is lauded by Jim Collins in his book ‘Good and Great’; people like Attila the Hun whose leadership secrets have been collected with time? According to Mintzberg [1], leaders share one personality trait in common, a passion to lead. But each of the above styles of leadership have their own and multiple advocates and acolytes. The field of Leadership does not have a dearth of experts or sophistication of approaches but there is still no consensus on which style of leadership is the most effective. Even though individual qualities of leaders do matter, the effectiveness of leadership is increasingly believed to depend on the situational and context factors in which the leaders are working. Research of 160 CEOs shows that leadership is driven not so much by what someone is like inside but by what the outside demands [2]. It is essential to consider temporal changes in patterns of leader behaviour and dynamics of the task undertaken by them when conceptualizing the effectiveness of their styles