Behaviorist Approach Leadership

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Leadership, as it pertains to people, may be as old as the creation of the first social groups, in which there was likely a leader of some kind. However, the understanding and articulation of leadership has evolved over the course of at least several thousand years, with more recent times displaying a sincere push to understand this basic social concept. Leadership can be explored in many ways, including the behavior of leaders and followers. In the past, behaviorism was found to be important for a number of psychological occurrences, including leadership. As with most systems, there are both strengths and limitations on how effectively behavior can explain leadership. The way leadership is understood through the application of behavior has …show more content…

This is also what made behaviorism so popular in psychology, it could produce real and measurable results (Hergenhahn & Henley, 2014). When these principles are applied to leaders and leadership, it can also give identifiable results and information that can be used to provide feedback and assistance in order to improve leadership roles. An obvious advantage of a behavioral approach is the ability to quantify behavior and use it as a means of prediction, which would be useful in many leadership situations (Moore, 2013). Another possible advantage of behavior based leadership is that it can be used in conjunction with a wide array of leadership styles in order to obtain the greatest amount of helpful …show more content…

Generally, task behaviors may be thought of as behavior that accomplishes work or activities, while relational behaviors would be the behavior that builds and maintains social systems. Both of these are important to leaders, and both would need to be used in order to accomplish the goals of a group. The use of task and relational behaviors has allowed for the creation of a grid system, with one behavior running along the x-axis and the other the y-axis (Northouse, 2016). The benefit of this is that it allows for a rating and expectation system, depending on where an individual would be plotted according to their task and/or relational

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