Leadership: Critical Literature Review

People Management and Organization
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Leadership: critical literature review
Introduction
It is true that leadership plays the essential role in the organization. Leaders are required to
possess the certain skills for successful completion of the task. In the recent time, various
organizations are successful due to proper implementation for the leadership skills. In the
report, several arguments are also presented in the report by underlining the viewpoints of
various authors.
According to Dimitrov (2015) leadership take place through the relationship between two or
more parties. The person who leads the team is called leader and person who are working as
per the direction of leaders are known as followers. In this way, leadership sets the example
for his followers in order to accomplish the objective. In this regard, Iqbal, Anwar and
Haider, (2015) highlighted that leadership only proves to be effective when leader has the
capability to develop and maintain the work of employees through effective encouragement
and monitoring. However, Storey (2016) has stated that it also depends on the behaviour or
attitude of persons who are taking training from leader. Due to the team negligence also,
sometimes leadership fails in accomplishing the objectives. It is also because different leaders
have different behaviour and attitude.
Debates
According to By, Burnes and Oswick (2012) organization’s requires the strong leadership for
proper effectiveness in the working of all the team members. Leadership in organization deals
with both psychological as well as human tactics. Leadership in organization also put
emphasis on the development of leadership skills and abilities that are significant across the
organization. Leadership in recent time has gained the huge popularity for smooth
functioning of the organization (Holten and Brenner, 2015). It has also identified the
leadership is considered as an effective way to lead the other people. Employees in such a
case play the essential role in ensuring the quality of the product. It is true that when
employees are clear about their requirement and expectation, they are likely to perform more
effective and better. However, Nguyen, Mia, Winata and Chong, (2017) has argued that
leaders are also responsible for provide the proper task and effectively allocating the job to
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employees. Leaders are also claimed to provide the positive impact on the effectiveness of
the organization by influencing all the team members. In recent time, various organizations
stress on formulating the team in order to increase the effectiveness of the organization. For
achieving this, the role of leaders in organization is more significant. However, it is more
significant for each of the member in organization to have clear duties, responsibilities for
understanding their role in the organization properly. Leaders are therefore required to
identify the expectations of top level management and communicate it properly to the team
members for better results and output.
Leadership helps the company in various ways. Effective leadership helps the team members
to accomplish their tasks in effective manner. It also tends to motivate its employees by
successful transfer of responsibilities to the employees. It also tends to increase the morale of
employees by including all the team members in decision making of the organization. As
compare to this Tourish (2011) stated that poor leadership that lacks the essential qualities,
abilities, and skills can lead to negative impact on the employees as well as organization. In
various organizations, high number of turnover is the reason of poor leadership. According to
him, there are times when leader offer very less opportunity for the welfare of worker. Due to
this reason, they do not invest their 100 per cent contribute for the welfare of organization.
Therefore, lack of opportunity means that the effective e0mployees may go somewhere else
or getting better career opportunities. Poor leaders can also put the negative impact on the
employees and can even damage the reputation of the company. Lehmann-Willenbrock,
Meinecke, Rowold and Kauffeld (2015) has also criticized by stating that bad leadership also
affect the ability of the organization in retaining employees, lower the motivation and morale
of employees, and decrease the productivity of employees. Poor leadership also do not value
any form of communication with its employees. In various organizations, poor leaders spend
the long hours away from their desk and ignore the email of staff. Listening to other people
and proper communication is the top priority of the leader. Therefore, lack of communication
and active listener might hamper the productivity of the employees. It also states that failing
in making the clear expectations can also frustrate the employees and hinder their capability
to complete the task successfully. In various organizations, poor leader do not tell their
employees when their work is due. Projects details can also be sometime vague that make
difficulty for the employees to guess all those factors that are considered important by the
supervisor. Several times project might involve the participation of more than one employee;
a poor leader in this case might not explain which employees are responsible for performing
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every part of the project. Poor leader can also be negative who do not enough knowledge
regarding how to motivate the other people. They sometimes also feel free in sharing the
negative opinion regarding the company.
Many of the findings on research state that leadership style puts the direct impact on the
productivity and wellbeing of employees. Therefore, effective leadership style helps in a
great way to successfully complex the task. Gil, Rodrigo-Moya and Morcillo-Bellido, (2018)
found that the leadership style that tends to be adopted by the leader affects perception of
learning, team cohesiveness and performance related learning within the team. As compare to
this, Saleem (2015) states that, a leader has some of the authorities based on the various
leadership styles such as democratic, autocratic, or Laissez Faire leadership style.
Theories
Various leadership theories have developed over the years such as trait theory, great man
theory, behavioural theory, contingency theory, situational leadership theory,
transformational theory, and transactional theory. In the opinion of Xu, Loi and Ngo ( 2016).
leaders are born and have some potential to become the leader. The existence and reliability
of great man theory was argued by the Nawaz and Khan, (2016) due to the irrelevancy of this
theory in some of the events. Some of the researchers have believed in the trait theory of
leadership by stating the distinctive features of leader from their followers in terms of
confidence, physical features, social characteristic, and personality attributes. However, this
theory has failed in explaining whether these traits are acquired or genetic. In this regard,
Xenikou (2017) have founded certain traits such as intelligence, height, self-confidence,
attractiveness as the essential component of leadership. However, trait theory failed as it
proved to be quite difficult to find out the traits that developed at certain time. In this way,
trait theory has also failed in producing seem kind of consistency in their finding. Apart from
this, trait theory of leadership also fails in producing the clear-cut results. Besides this, it has
not considered the whole environment of leadership in which trait is only the one factor. It
has also not given any evidence regarding the degree of several traits as people have different
traits in them. Several traits are also being specified for the leaders but they not proved to be
good leader.
As compare to this, Antonakis and Day (2017) has introduced the contingency model of
leadership that claims that effectiveness of leadership directly depends on the situation. In
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