Leadership investigation and practices have been paid renewed attention in the recent years due to the unprecedented transformations experienced by organizations towards the end of the last millennium (Tirmizi, 2002). Jago (1982) stated that despite various investigations on this subject, up to then there was no clear and unequivocal understanding of what distinguished a leader from a non-leader, and perhaps even more importantly, what distinguished an efficient leader from an inefficient leader.
Leadership is a topic that has aroused much interest among people, and is probably one of mankind’s most ancient concerns (Tirmizi, 2002). Leadership exists predominantly inside people and organizations (Chang and Lee, 2007). Put simplistically, leadership can be said to be the ability to affect others (Bethel, 1990). Bohn and Grafton (2002) stated that leadership means the path to create a clear vision of tasks, giving subordinates self-confidence created through permanent coordination and communication. It has long been debated if leaders are born with that characteristic or if anyone can be trained to become a leader (Armandi
et al., 2003). Bass and Avolio (1990) concluded that leadership type and level of success depend on the agreement between cultural values and the leadership process.
Wu (2009) identified four periods in the development of leadership theory—the theory of traits/characteristics; the theory of behavior; contingency theory; and new approaches to leadership. For Armandi et al. (2003), the first leadership theories contain theories focused on how to be an efficient leader, and not how to make leadership efficient. Traditional leadership theories see the relationship between leaders and followers as active and passive (Wu, 2009), whereas in the new theories leadership is a continuous, adjusted process where the leader’s behavior changes according to the feedback from followers.
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