Leadership Studies : Final Review

If you had the chance to read all the articles in the series, I think you’ll agree with me that there’s a lot to say about leadership. It’s a complex subject, and even more, it’s a developing subject. The last century has brought up many branches for investigation in this prolific field of research, and it seems that the tendency won’t stop in the near future.

Leadership has to do with human nature, with relationships, organizations, and countries. And It’s part of our every day life, and as such, we need to know the most about it. I think we have the privilege to look at this subject and try to grasp the most of it. Most of the people out there doesn’t even know what leadership is, or have a very “romantical” idea about it.

What we’ve seen in the studies is just a brief sight of the most relevant and resounding theories that scientists have formulated about leadership. But even more important is the fact that leadership can be “learned”, can be “applied” and can be “used” to achieve the goals of the organizations we belong to, the goals of our teams, even our personal goals.

Just to refresh the memory, the approaches and theories we’ve looked at throughout the series are:

• The Leadership Traits Approach
• The Leadership Skills Approach
• The Leadership Style Approach
• Situational Leadership
• The Contingency Theory
• The Path Goal Theory
• The LMX Theory
• Transformational Leadership
• Team Leadership

When you look at the list of the studies there’s a clear pattern of evolution and change of focus about leadership. In the begining, the evident and the obvious subject of study for researchers was the leader. All the attention and focus was on the leader, from traits to skills, and then to behaviors. Researchers tried to explain how people turned themselves into successful leaders. A sentence that clearly summarizes the spirit of these approaches is: “Leadership style is the combination of traits, skills, and behaviors leaders use as they interact with followers” Northouse, 2004).

Later on, the approaches and theories changed the focus from the leader to the “relationship” that leadership involves. Specifically they focused on the leader and the followers, the interaction among them and how important they are to achieve a great leadership. In the studies we’ve seen that leadership develops in certain environments that also affect the outcomes of the group, and that environment has also been took into account in the theories.

In the last part of the 20th century, more theories and approaches were developed. Transformational leadership and team leadership have become the focus and subject of study of great number of scholars that work to help their organizations better places to work.

Final Thoughts

If you look around you it’s probably that you’ll find a leader near you, and it’s probably also that your view towards him or her has changed now that you know how leadership has been studied by scientists and researchers in the 20th century.

It’s clear that we’re at the dawn of a revolution even greater than the industrial age, we can say where we’re coming from, but it’s really difficult to say where our society is going to. Changes are so fast, the world is “flattening”, it’s hard to know if an organization will last more than five years. It’s an ongoing challenge to all of us.

I’m optimistic about the future, all the advancements, the innovations, and the all-time-all-connected society, are a reality. But that reality require leadership from us. We need to talk about it, work to become leaders in our families, our communities, it’s up to us to build a better world.

All the technology and all the theories are worthless if we don’t use them for the good, it’s time to use what we’ve learnt. Use as much as possible of the information you’ve learnt, discuss the topics with colleagues, friends, spouse, brothers, talk with people, ask questions, work your way to become a leader. In other words, spread the word.

I hope you’d found the articles of the series useful, I did my best. Now you have knowledge you can share with as much people as you can. I will keep adding new information and creating new articles about Leadership.