10.4 Key Takeaways, Knowledge Check and Key Terms

Key Takeaways

  • Leadership is a bit different than management in that management includes a “title” while leadership and the leadership development process can occur without a title.
  • Leaders can be appointed into a role, elected into the role, or emerge into the role of leader.
  • Characteristics of the situation, task, and/or organization may make a leader less effective or unnecessary.
  • We reviewed several influential leadership theories:
    • Theory X and Theory Y leaders hold different fundamental assumptions about the nature of employees and their motivations at work.
    • Trait approaches identify the characteristics required to be perceived as a leader and to be successful in the role.
    • Intelligence, extraversion, conscientiousness, openness to experience, and integrity seem to be leadership traits.
    • Behavioural approaches identify the types of behaviours leaders demonstrate.
    • Both trait and behavioural approaches suffered from a failure to pay attention to the context in which leadership occurs, which led to the development of contingency approaches such as situational leadership and path-goal theories.
    • Recently, ethics became an explicit focus of leadership theories such as servant leadership and authentic leadership.
    • It seems that being conscious of one’s style and making sure that leaders demonstrate the behaviours that address employee, organizational, and stakeholder needs are important and require flexibility on the part of leaders.
  • Leadership skills are not simply born, they’re made. We don’t need to wait until we have the title of manager to begin developing our skill set – can grow and develop our leadership skills now. This chapter provided several suggestions for developing your own leadership and communication skills.

Knowledge Check

Review your understanding of this chapter’s key concepts by taking the interactive quiz below.

definition

License

Icon for the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

Psychology, Communication, and the Canadian Workplace Copyright © 2022 by Laura Westmaas, BA, MSc is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

Share This Book