In this course, we examine leadership in organisations. We first of all highlight that leadership is one of the key managerial roles and assert the importance to organisations of effective leadership. Leadership skills and the sources of a leader’s power are then explored and we make clear that formal management position is just one of these.

The sources of a leader’s power are, in fact, broken down into personal power sources and organisational power sources, and to help clarify this distinction, we discuss the notions of transactional leadership and transformational leadership.

Finally, we present and evaluate two important approaches to leadership effectiveness: the universal traits approach and the situation-contingent traits approach. In terms of the latter, we give an appreciation of Fiedler’s extensive work in this area.

By the end of the session, you should be able to:

• define the basic process of leadership.
   

• understand the relationship between leadership and management.
   

• explain key leadership skills.
   

• identify the sources of a leader’s power.
   

• distinguish between transactional and transformational leaders.
   

• appreciate the universal personality traits approach to leadership.
   

• appreciate the situation-contingent personality traits approach to leadership.