Leadership Challenges: Traits, Behavior, Relationship, and Contingency Approaches

Running head: LEADERSHIP CHALLENGES
LEADERSHIP CHALLENGES
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LEADERSHIP CHALLENGES1
Challenges related to Traits, behavior and relationship of leader
Traits refer to all those characteristics that are present in an individual and therefore
distinguish him from others. Some of these characteristics are honesty, integrity, optimism, self-
confidence and others. It was also found through research that some of these leadership traits are
present in individuals from birth (Ebookcentral.proquest.com., 2019). Optimism refers to the
ability to have a positive attitude towards life and everything. Research has revealed that most of
the leaders are people who could see opportunity even when others could not and therefore they
rose to the top. The leaders need to have self-confidence without which leaders will be unable to
take proper decisions. The leaders need to have confidence such that they can take risks and
others. Drive is another major attribute that needs to present in leaders in order to face difficult
problems, to overcome those and also to overcome the challenges of leadership. These traits
along with various other traits need to be present in leaders or it can lead to various other
problems (Farahnak et al., 2019). They may face other problems such as fail to win the trust of
leaders if they lack these traits. Behavioral theory has to be understood in order to understand the
behaviors of leaders.

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Figure 1: Behavioral Theory of grid leadership
Source: (Barge, 2019)
From the above diagram of leadership it can be understood that the leaders are basically
divided into two types- on the basis of results or the leaders who emphasize on leaders and the
leaders who focus on creating better relationship with the leaders. On the basis of this there are
five main styles of leadership- authoritative leaders, impoverished leaders, middle road leaders,
country club leaders and team management (González-Cruz, Botella-Carrubi & Martínez-
Fuentes, 2019). The main challenges faced by authoritative leaders is that they focus on results
and therefore do not desire to create good relationship with the employees and these leaders fail
to get the satisfaction of the employees and therefore may achieve only the results and not

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extraordinary results. The impoverished leaders are the ones who cannot drive results or even
cannot create good relationship with the employees. Their main aim of such leaders is to sustain
in the organization and therefore they face many issues such as they cannot get their work done
and they cannot get the trust of the employees because of poor relationship them (Hunt &
Fedynich, 2019). The leadership which is the most desirable according to the grid theory of
leadership is the teamwork leadership style in which the leader easily gets his work done by
others due to good relationships with them. If a leader does not have proper relationship with the
employees there will be lack of open communication in the organization, there will be lack of
trust between the employees and the management of the organization, the employees may quit
the organization if they feel that their problems are not being considered, there may be loss of
productivity and others issues as a result of poor relationship between the leaders and the
members of the organization. Martin Winterkorn who was the former CEO of Volkswagen was
known for carrying out unethical and illegal software practices in the company and therefore due
to his dishonesty he had to face many challenges.
Challenges related to leader as an individual
A leader as an individual needs to have self-awareness in order to become an effective
one and they need to know who they actually are and what are they standing for. For instance a
leader may think of themselves as honest, optimistic leaders. However their employees may
consider them menacing and it is the blind spot which stops these leaders from identifying their
weakness. Therefore a leader must therefore be able to identify the blind spots such that they can
understand their weakness and work on it. In this respect it is necessary to understand the
personalities of leaders. Personality refers to those characteristics that are unseen. There are
different models that are used in order to understand the personality of people (Ayub, Kanwal &