Lesson 1 Wrap-Up

This lesson has helped us understand the different types of explanations for leadership; theories and maxims. But it has also helped us start to get an idea of what leadership is and how we will study leadership in this class. We defined leadership and discussed that leadership is a process. Leadership is an interaction between followers and leaders in different situations.

Next we talked about how we can study leadership in many different ways. In this class, we will look at a number of different approaches to leadership including the trait approach, style approach, situational approach, psychodynamic approach, power approach, contingency theory, path-goal theory, leader member exchange theory, and transformational leadership theory.

In this lesson, we also discussed the interaction of power and leadership. We differentiated between power and influence and discussed sources of power: expert power, referent power, legitimate power, reward power, and coercive power. Using each of these types of power has pros and cons. Leaders and follower utilize different types of power in different situations.

Leaders and followers use a number of influence tactics in order to influence behavior. These tactics include: rational persuasion, inspirational appeals, consultation, ingratiation, personal appeals, exchange, coalition tactics, pressure tactics, and legitimizing tactics.

Finally, knowledge of some basic human tendencies can allow a person to use social influence. The 6 principles are: liking, social proof, commitment and consistency, authority, scarcity, and reciprocity. Uses these principles can trigger automatic behaviors in others to comply with requests.

Finally, we discussed leadership assessment. We learned that the traditional ways of choosing leaders such as using application blanks and unstructured interviews are not valid. Rather, we should create competency models and use a multiple-hurdles approach to choose leaders. We can tell if there is a relationship between leader attributes and leadership effectiveness through both qualitative methods (including case studies) and quantitative methods (correlations and experiments).