Leadership

Leadership

In today's world, when people thinks of the word leadership, one of the first thing they think of is presidents sending their troops overseas to fight wars against other nations or against terrorism. It is obvious why people think this particular way because the world has been in a frequent state of war during the past couple years. To further ours understanding of what the word leadership really means, in this essay we will define "leadership", describe the five sources of a leader's power, explain the myths of leadership, and discuss several leadership styles and the current thinking about leadership.

So, what is leadership? According to Katherine Adams and Gloria Galanes in "Communicating in groups", leadership is "the use of communication to modify attitudes and behaviors of members to meet group goals and needs" (252). It is a process where one individual influences other group members to work towards the achievement of defined group goals. Leadership can be achieved through communicative interaction between members in a group. It engages persuasion and discussion among group's members. Group leaders must be flexible to accept the changing condition of the group. In addition, a significant part of effective leadership is the close connection between the leaders and group members. Group leaders must try to understand the needs and beliefs of their members for them to be able to modify the members' attitudes and behaviors in supporting the group goals.

As a leader of a group, this individual must has the ability to influence other group members. According to Adams and Galances, "Raven and French identified five sources of interpersonal power that provide someone with the ability to influence others are: legitimate, reward, punishment, expert, and referent power" (252). Legitimate power is the power to influence others based on the title or position of a person. As an example, having the title of "president" of an organization allows this person the right to call meetings, set up the agenda, and asks other members to do certain tasks when needed. Reward and punishment power are the powers to influence others based on someone's ability to give or take away what members want and need. For example, ours bosses have the power to influence us because they can reward us with monetary bonuses or promotion at the end of the year, or they can punish us by giving us a lot of work to do. Another different source of power to influence others is expert power. Someone with expert power can be recognized as an intelligent person with knowledge or skill valuable to the group. A coworker at the optometry where I works has the expert power because she is an expert at fixing glasses. She can help us fix any kind of glasses when we have trouble fixing them. The last form of power that gives a person the ability to influence other people is referent power. A person with referent power is the one that make others admire and want to be like. For example, the manager at my current workplace has influence on me because I really like her personality and admires her intelligence. She has a referent power over me because I always look up to her and want to be like her.

Even when the idea of leadership is quite popular, many people often have the wrong perception about leadership. These people sometime mistake leaders as someone that has the power to give order to other members or tell others what to do. In addition, people believe that leaders are usually born with a set of traits that give them the ability to become leaders. However, in reality no single set of traits will identify the best leader for any condition. Instead, the leadership behaviors can be learns through experiences and the current situation. Another myth about leadership is that many people expect leaders to perform an excellent job at both task-oriented and relationship-oriented behaviors.

Because different leaders have their own skills, they can lead their group through different styles depend on the group condition. Research shows that the three