Leadership Definition: Leadership is the building of motivation through individuals in aid of reaching a certain set of objectives. A good leader is someone who can lead to good results, by using what he has in the best way possible.
Leadership Behaviours Definition: Another way to look at the ability of a leader is through the way they act, they way they behave. When looking into this theory, two main behaviours were found and put into meta categories. The two identified behaviours were; task-oriented behaviour and people-oriented behaviour.
People-Oriented Behaviour
As the name suggests this type of leader is more of a peoples person and likes to take care of his organisation by motivating staff, building teams and making employees feel involved as this can build a strong culture and environment in an organisation and in turn, motivated employees lead to harder working employees which consequently means that tasks are done not only better, but in many cases quicker which will help profits at the organisation.
Communication in these organisations will be open, which allows them to change quickly as ideas and market changes are quickly realised and passed onto the people who need to know about them.
Despite the positives, too much friendship making with the staff may make them felt that they can slack, and therefore not get things done in time, this is because there is no real discouragement from not doing the work on time. As well as this, there may not be a willingness for people to work there way up and push for better results as in these situations people tend to be a lot more content within their current positions.
Task-Oriented Behaviour
Again, as the name suggests we have the opposite to the above. In this organisation the leader will be more focused on the tasks which need to be completed. This means they are always working towards a goal and therefore giving their subordinates delegated tasks to improve efficiency and planning ahead of time to make sure they are always on the ball.
The advantages of this is that it allows the organisation to always be on top of what it is doing and therefore quick to change due to market shifts or competitor action. It also means that staff feel more pressured to work which could improve efficiency. On the other and it could lead to lower motivation levels which in turn lead to a poor culture of employees which creates a different environment to work within.
It has been said that the best combination is the above two behaviours to be high in a leader, so that they treat their staff well and get on with the task in hand. On the other hand, any combination could work in different situations, so the best way to be a good leader would be to access the situation and lead accordingly.
Some other research at the Ohio State University found two major behaviours; Consideration and Initiating Structure. Both of these pretty much refer to the above two behaviours. All these behaviours are separate from each other which means a leader can be high, low or in the middle of each one.
