Introduction: The common theme

Why was the study done? What was the population studied? What did the researcher(s) conclude? What other information about this study do you believe is unique or important to recall? Are there specific statements made by the author that you wish to retain?

With the importance of leadership felt across different organisations in all modern day businesses, it would be worth to discussion various facets of this topic. Hence the current piece of annotated bibliography endeavours to undertake a critical review of the conceptualisation behind leadership in general, context of different types of leadership style, its political implications and the identity surrounding the leadership.While a host of deliberations by a number of researchers across different fora and papers are available, a holistic understanding is still far from its final mile (Druskat, 1994; Komives et al. 2005). Therefore, the current article presents an annotated bibliography of this topic touching upon the important aspects by evaluating a set of 3 papers through a critical review.

Lilienfeld, S O.; Waldman, I D.; Landfield, K; Watts, A L; Rubenzer, S and Faschingbauer, T R. (2012). Fearless Dominance and the US presidency: Implications of psychopathic personality traits for successful and unsuccessful political leadership. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103(3): 489-505.

The paper by Lilienfeld (2012) endeavours to examine both the positive and negative aspects of psychopathic personality and its conditional implication with leadership. The literature review of this paper finds at one hand a majority of incidence on behavioural level manifestations surrounding psychopathy and the coincidence of such with antisocial elements and almost an unsuccessful situation so a failed leadership. On the other hand the literature critic of this papers also present a contrast picture that certain traits of psychopathic nature like interpersonal level of dominance, power of persuading people and similar ones prove to be conducive to acquire political positions and in turn successful type of leadership. In this line, the current paper finds many research works supporting the idea of conventionally linking the condition of psychopathy with unsuccessful situations, but at clinical studies same condition (psychopathy) has to some extent has linkage with successful behaviour at social contexts including politics, business and other works of life.

The methodology this paper specifically tries to examine the possible linkage of various traits of psychopath personality with successful outcomes like better performance in job and leadership taking very successful persons in the study sample. They include 42 presidents of US up to George W. Bush. The sample comprises of presidents’ performance and behaviour across history and the data was rated by 121 experts. It was also supported by other historical surveys development of objective indicators of performance. The analysis of this paper mostly employed statistical techniques including factor analysis. The finding of this paper presents a number of characteristics of successful leadership like fearless dominance, persuading nature, better management of crisis emerged with the president’s features vis-à-vis some sort of psychopathic traits. Even better relationship management, similar features, seemed to have significant linkage with variables of president level performance, mainly when people taken as world level figures. Some sort of limitations were identified by this paper too which are cautioned to be interpreted in associationship between control variable and covariates. Contrast to successful behaviour, deviating behaviour too emerged with psychopathic conditions. They included impulsive actions, negative type of job performance, impeachment decisions, not acting on unethical behaviour among subordinates etc. The paper in addition to statistical inferences provides the research world, a better platform to debate whether certain condition of psychopathy can be seen as positive leadership behaviour and some time negative ones.

Fearless Dominance and the US presidency

Van Eeden, R., Cilliers, F., & van Deventer, V. (2008). Leadership styles and associated personality traits: Support for the conceptualisation of transactional and transformational leadership. South African Journal of Psychology, 38(2), 253-267.

The present paper by Van Eden et al. (2008) presents a vivid description about the leadership model and the types or categories of styles associated with the leadership model for the smooth running of a management system. The model of leadership described in this paper comprises of transactional type of leadership, laissez faire behaviour in addition to transformational kind of leadership. Here the model of leadership is conceptualized by the behaviour around with various styles, which is empirically supported. The transactional leadership described in this paper includes that type of leadership whereby the particular leader makes it clear about the course pattern of work the followers should carry out as in a typical transaction such as complete given task successfully, for receiving any reward as punishment that would again include satisfying the need of followers, which is subject to fulfilling of that transaction which is satisfaction of need of the leader.

Literature critique cited inside this paper finds the link between work environment with globalisation in context of acceleration of tempo of the change accruing in technology, market, workforce, and expectation of workforce The critique about transactional as well as transformational distinctly viewing the leadership concept either as a condition of provisional reinforcement towards followers by transactional leadership or displacing the followers out of latter’s self-interests in the light of organizational and societal betterment. As part of the research methodology this article has used specific questionnaire which included assessment of personality traits and leadership style.

This paper observes that this study greatly supports the leadership styles at conceptualisation level. It infers that the style of leadership is also linked with personality level traits. These results were clearly observed in better strategic type of thinking, innovative approach among the sample managers.

Odom, S. F., Boyd, B. L., & Williams, J. (2012).Impact of Personal Growth Projects on Leadership Identity Development. Journal of Leadership Education, 11(1), 49-63.

This article by Odom et al. (2012) investigates the change in course of leadership mainly in terms of identity development among leadership education students by using specific tools. The paper envisages that inside the courses providing leadership education, the educators may try to incorporate real life cases which students can try developing leadership qualities. Against this backdrop the current piece of paper uses qualitative methodology which includes personal awareness and similar projects. The paper critique a number of similar studies demonstrating models with a number of constructs or tools used for leadership identity development. The data this paper employs comes from students at undergraduate level from Texas A&M University for a personal leadership education program. A total of 90 students were chosen using random sampling technique across 3 different study seasons. The data were analysed using deductive type of content analysis.

The paper thus analyses the assignments given during Personal Growth Projectsusing the components from an established model in name of Leadership Identity Development. Different aspects comprising of development of self-aspects of the model which included building of self-confidence among students, deepening of own awareness, interpersonal level efficacy among many other variables were considered. The major observation of the analysis of this paper showed the assignment emerged to be extremely effective towards promotion of student’s identity of leadership mainly in category of self in the model. The paper however recommends conducting further research including other models of leadership project so as to validate and strengthen the findings.

Conclusion:

From annotated bibliography of these 3 papers it becomes clear that the topic of leadership style is topic worth debatable across research forum. There is lot of variation in conceptualisation in case of transactional and transformational leadership and identity associated with leadership. Even the concept of leadership style varies greatly across contexts mainly in political circumstances. The discussion overall throws a lot of inputs and recommendation for further research that should take utmost care of varying contexts of leadership before making generalisation.

References:

1. Druskat, Vanessa Urch (1994). Gender and leadership style: Transformational and transactional leadership in the Roman Catholic Church, The Leadership Quarterly, 5(2): 99–119

2. Eagly, Alice H.; Johnson, Blair T. (1990). Gender and leadership style: A meta-analysis, Psychological Bulletin, 108(2): 233-256.

3. Hogg, Michael A. (2001). A Social Identity Theory of Leadership, Personality and Social Psychology Review, 5 (3): 184-200.

4. Komives, Susan R.; Owen, Julie E.; Longerbeam, Susan D.; Mainella, Felicia C. and Osteen, Laura (2005). Developing a Leadership Identity: A Grounded Theory, Journal of College Student Development, 46 (6): 593-611

5. Lilienfeld, S. O., Waldman, I. D., Landfield, K., Watts, A. L., Rubenzer, S., &Faschingbauer, T. R. (2012). Fearless dominance and the U.S. presidency: Implications of psychopathic personality traits for successful and unsuccessful political leadership. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103(3), 489-505.

6. Mandell, Barbara and Pherwani, Shilpa (2003). Relationship Between Emotional Intelligence and Transformational Leadership Style: A Gender Comparison, Journal of Business and Psychology, 17 (3): 387-404

7. McColl-Kennedy, Janet R and Anderson, Ronald D (2002). Impact of leadership style and emotions on subordinate performance, The Leadership Quarterly, 13 (5): 545–559

8. Odom, S. F., Boyd, B. L., & Williams, J. (2012). Impact of Personal Growth Projects on Leadership Identity Development. Journal of Leadership Education, 11(1), 49-63.

9. Ogbonna , Emmanuel and Harris, Lloyd C. (2000). Leadership style, organizational culture and performance: empirical evidence from UK companies, The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 11(4): 766-788.

10. Van Eeden, R., Cilliers, F., & van Deventer, V. (2008). Leadership styles and associated personality traits: Support for the conceptualisation of transactional and transformational leadership. South African Journal of Psychology, 38(2): 253-267.