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Jackson, Brad and Ken Parry. A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book About Studying Leadership. Los Angeles: SAGE Publications, Ltd., 2008.
You have some clear convictions about what you think constitutes the right and the wrong way to lead someone or to be led by someone.
While the importance of the role of individual leaders tends to be overestimated, the significance of leadership itself should never be underestimated.
If you do not aspire to change something and you don’t have a good reason for changing it, you cannot and should not lead.
In summary, the trait approach to leadership has had problems, has been discredited, and is really not valid now.
If you strike the right balance between concern for people and concern for production, you will be the most effective leader.
The behavioural approach to leadership has also gone out of favour in recent years, with the exception that transformational leadership has been criticized as another behavioural theory under a different guise.
The trait approach to leadership seemed to say that men were better leaders than women. The behavioural approach now seems to suggest that women demonstrate better leadership than men do, on average. Actually, there is no consensus in the literature about gender differences in leadership styles. For example, only weak evidence exists suggesting that women display more transformational leadership than men. …