Leadership Case Study

The main component of an organization is people. A team of people work together to achieve the common goal of the organization. For an organization to operate successfully it must have a vision, policies, procedures and governance. Each of these four items are determined, implemented and overseen by the leaders of the organization. Leadership is an important part of each phase of an organization beginning with the start of the organization and continuing until the disbanding of the organization. Since leadership of an organization has a strong impact on every organization it is often researched in the study of organizational behavior (OB) (Kreitner & Kinick, 2014). There are five approaches of studying leadership. The study of leadership approaches began in the early part of the 20th century and continues today. Researchers in the past and today realize that there is not one best approach to leadership (Kreitner & Kinick, 2014). Different organizational environments require different leadership approaches. The

The theory is based on the premise that leader behaviors are learned and not inherent traits in a leader’s personality (Kreitner & Kinick, 2014). As an example, the manner in which the leader communicates the tasks that need to be done is a learned behavior compared to the vocal tone of the leader’s voice which is an inherent trait. Ohio State University had a team of researchers study the behaviors of leaders beginning in 1946 and continued for ten years. The team developed a Leader Behavior Description Questionnaire with 150 descriptive leadership processes and asked how often the leader performed the process utilizing a scale of always to never (Halpin, 1956). From the results the team identified that there were two elements of leader behavior, consideration and initiating structure (Kreitner & Kinick,