Leadership Styles And Theories In An Effective Management Activity

In recent years, beyond their aim to survive and to sustain their presence by improving performance, more and more organizations are involved with some form of competition for customers, for gaining advantage on the utilization of scarce resources, leadership becoming the key critical factor for achieving this performance given the actual context of market globalization. The human activity has become a continuous learning, adaptation, competition and selection process. The quest to understand leadership, across different sectors and disciplines, has easily proved that literature is vast in this field. This paper examines the concept of leadership, generally, and its relevance towards improving management activities. After decades of research it seems that issues are complex, leadership being considered “the most studied and least understood concept of any in the social sciences” (Bennis and Nanus, 1997). Many researchers and practitioners have developed a consensus that the progression of thinking over the years has developed a belief that leadership is a flexible developmental process. Our attempt to outline the features of the concept made it necessary to overview some common definitions of leadership. The paper begins with overview of the meaning and concept of leadership and then followed by an short examination of different leadership theories and styles of leadership. Main theories that emerged during 20th century include: the Great Man theory, Trait theory, Contingency and Situational theories, Skills theory, Behavioral theory, Transformational, Transactional and Participative leadership theory. This paper concludes that success is certain in different types of activities if leadership styles, principles and theories are properly applied in organizations’ activities in different fields.