Cultural Dimensions of Leadership
February 12, 2025
Dealing with Radical Change We live in times when change is the only constant. Indeed, organizations now compete in an external market landscape where the time to market is in the months and not years, as earlier, and where each new technology or trend that emerges leads to another round and wave of disruption. Just […]
The concept of reinsurance is fairly simple. When a person takes on insurance, they transfer their risks to the insurance company. The insurance company sells the same contract to many people to create a pool of money. Since all the people are not likely to face an adverse event at the same time, insurance companies […]
Reinsurance contracts tend to be very complicated. As we have already studied in the previous articles, a wide variety of complicated structures with various cash flow probabilities are associated with reinsurance contracts. Hence, it needs to be understood that the complicated nature of these reinsurance contracts sometimes ends up creating complicated accounting policies as well. […]
Virtual team is an emerging new-age trend with followers across business sectors. Just like any other new trend, virtual team also has to undergo strict scrutiny of researchers to weigh its advantages and disadvantages before being accepted by the professionals. The advantages and disadvantages of virtual teams can be looked upon from three levels – […]
In the previous articles, we have already studied about the concept of reinsurance. However, the reinsurance we have studied is a contract between two independent parties. This means that a ceding insurance company often transfers the risk to an external third-party reinsurance service provider. The risk actually moves out of the balance sheet of the […]
The trait model of leadership is based on the characteristics of many leaders - both successful and unsuccessful - and is used to predict leadership effectiveness. The resulting lists of traits are then compared to those of potential leaders to assess their likelihood of success or failure.
Scholars taking the trait approach attempted to identify physiological (appearance, height, and weight), demographic (age, education and socioeconomic background), personality, self-confidence, and aggressiveness), intellective (intelligence, decisiveness, judgment, and knowledge), task-related (achievement drive, initiative, and persistence), and social characteristics (sociability and cooperativeness) with leader emergence and leader effectiveness.
Successful leaders definitely have interests, abilities, and personality traits that are different from those of the less effective leaders. Through many researches conducted in the last three decades of the 20th century, a set of core traits of successful leaders have been identified. These traits are not responsible solely to identify whether a person will be a successful leader or not, but they are essentially seen as preconditions that endow people with leadership potential.
Among the core traits identified are:
The trait theory gives constructive information about leadership. It can be applied by people at all levels in all types of organizations.
Managers can utilize the information from the theory to evaluate their position in the organization and to assess how their position can be made stronger in the organization. They can get an in-depth understanding of their identity and the way they will affect others in the organization. This theory makes the manager aware of their strengths and weaknesses and thus they get an understanding of how they can develop their leadership qualities.
The traits approach gives rise to questions: whether leaders are born or made; and whether leadership is an art or science. However, these are not mutually exclusive alternatives. Leadership may be something of an art; it still requires the application of special skills and techniques. Even if there are certain inborn qualities that make one a good leader, these natural talents need encouragement and development.
A person is not born with self-confidence. Self-confidence is developed, honesty and integrity are a matter of personal choice, motivation to lead comes from within the individual, and the knowledge of business can be acquired. While cognitive ability has its origin partly in genes, it still needs to be developed. None of these ingredients are acquired overnight.
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