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E-book The Enactment of Strategic Leadership : A Critical Perspective
First and foremost, we can view leadership from the perspective of the leader: their inherent traits and learned and acquired skills, or behaviour patterns, manifested in interactions with others in and outside of the collective.Approaches based on leaders’ traits assume that some leaders possess certain qualities, characteristics and attributes that make them more effi-cient than others (Bryman, 1986; Stogdill, 1948, 1974). Leaders are born rather than created, and the success of leadership is explained by the pos-session of special traits that distinguish leaders from “ordinary” people. Or, as the great writer Goethe wrote: A great person attracts great people and knows how to hold them together. This school of thought is called the great man theory or, more often, the trait theory, with an emphasis on identifying the people who are destined to assume leader positions at all levels in the society, and exploring the important traits and attributes that successful leaders possess or should possess (examples include Kirkpatrick & Locke, 1991; Zaccaro et al., 2004; Zaccaro, 2007; Malakyan, 2015).Talent is the key aspect of leadership. As the renowned management author Peter F. Drucker stressed in The Practice Management in 1954: Leadership is of the utmost importance. Indeed there is no substitute for it (...) But leadership cannot be created or promoted. It cannot be taught or learned (p. 156).Stogdill (1974) identifies ten key leadership traits: (1) drive for respon-sibility and task completion, (2) vigour and persistence in pursuit of goals, (3) risk taking and originality in problem solving, (4) drive to exer-cise initiative in social situations, (5) self-confidence and sense of per-sonal identity, (6) willingness to accept consequences of decision and action, (7) readiness to absorb interpersonal stress, (8) willingness to tol-erate frustration and delay, (9) ability to influence other people’s behav-iour, and (10) capacity to structure social interaction systems to the purpose at hand.In Northouse’s opinion (2010: 19–21), the best leaders have the fol-lowing five most important traits: (1) intellectual capabilities, a combina-tion of verbal, perceptual, and reasoning capabilities, (2) self-confidence, reflected in self-respect, self-assuredness, and strong conviction that one has the capacity to attain goals, (3) determination in action, (4) integrity, including honesty and the trust one inspires, and (5) sociability, or the inclination to seek and build social relationships in which everyone will feel comfortable.
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