Leadership Styles Paper

Leadership Styles and Management Skills (Name of Student) (Course) (Date of Submission) In any group organization, one thing that is very important in the long term success of the group’s vision is leadership. Leadership and management skills are significant aspects of the organization’s productivity and effectiveness. The role of the leader in establishing good relationship with the group members and staff is fundamental to the growth of the group and the individual members. In health care environments, leadership and management among health care providers are necessary in making the community more support-giving and healing. The effectiveness of the group can be essentially brought up together if proper management is present. Thus, we see that leadership is not simply being the head of an organization. It is not being in a position for the rank itself. Leaders and their management skills will affect the whole system of the organization in many ways. In this paper, leadership as an important component of organization management will be discussed. In relation to it, two examples of styles of leadership will be studied in order to see the difference and importance of choosing the type of leadership that one can practice for the benefit of the management. Moreover, in this paper, it is also important to see the difference and similarities of the concepts of leadership and management. In relation to the concepts, the role of leaders will be explored particularly its connection with the productivity and job satisfaction of their staff. Lastly, in order to see practical application of the terms, health care environment will be used as setting to further understand the subject matter in relation to philosophy of nursing and health care management. Leadership as a concept can be understood in many ways depending on who is the one defining the term (Northouse, 2004, 2). Since leadership is understood relative to the definitions given to it, the concept has been studied and analyzed in various perspectives. In summary, enumeration of different leadership styles is given in order to see the distinctions among the different styles. In different books, number of enumerated styles varies as some identified four types while others gave as much as eight types of leadership patterns (see Banerjee, 1995; Northouse, 2004; Cherry, n.d.; Johnson & Johnson, 1991). Generally, theories of leadership can be enumerated as follows: great man theory, trait theory, contingency theory, situational theory, behavioral theory, participative theory, management theory and lastly, relationship theory (Cherry n. d.). In analysis, these theories came into light almost chronologically as observed in human history seeing that a theory appeared after another. Looking at our history, we can see that ‘great man’ theory is the most ancient in all of the perspectives (Borgatta, Bales and Couch, 1954). However, through time other theories came in to recognize the wider grounds of leadership. Two of these theories namely, trait theory and participative theory will be discussed in this paper in order to analyze which of the theories is most effective among others. Trait theory refers to how leaders are generally observed to have certain remarkable traits that made them effective in leading people (Banerjee, 1995). Basically, these traits are ‘intelligence, scholarship, dependability, responsibility, and strong motivation’ (Banerjee, 1995, 224). As we can observe, similar to great man theory, the enumerated traits made us imagine how ‘perfect’ a leader must be. In here, the enthusiasm and ...