FOR LEADERSHIP AND MOTIVATION
( S. SRIKANTH)
As India attempts to carve out a niche for itself in a globalised and shrinking world, it is becoming increasingly apparent that economic growth and prosperity are functions of the quality of corporate leadership at all levels. Organisations that can create and nurture leadership at every level can and do outperform those which merely depend upon conventional incentives based on financial and or non-financial parameters.
Leadership holds an important place in philosophy and history for quite obvious reasons. Leadership is a volatile, almost chimerical quality. The same aspects of a person’s character that tend to make them a natural leader usually also conspire to make them an unmitigated pain.
In fact, most psychological research on leadership from about 1900 to 1950 was devoted to identifying magic leadership traits or personality patterns that seem to have made a difference in organizational performance. In 1948 and again in 1974, Professor Ralph Stogdill1 published review of almost 300 empirical studies on leadership traits. He was forced to conclude in both of these reviews that there was no evidence of a single trait or characteristic that identified a person as a leader.
The answer to the quintessential question as to whether true leaders are born or made is that leadership does not simply appear to be something with which an individual is born. First and foremost, it does seem to be a learned, interpersonal relationship. This paper attempts to present a model for Leadership that can be easily applied at all levels of management
2. Leadership Models
Based on the relevant literature this section seeks to document the progress of academic thinking on leadership as also their link to the theory proposed by this paper. Among the best known theories on leadership is McGregor’s2 Theory X, Theory Y. Although this is basically...