Leadership - Are Leaders Born Or Made?

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Term Paper Title	Leadership - Are Leaders Born Or Made?
# of Words	2184
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	8.74

Leadership - Are leaders born or made?

     Leadership - Hollander in 1985 described it as "The process of influence between a leader and followers to attain group organisation or social goals".
     Are leaders born or made? In this essay I hope to investigate this question using studies and theories on the subject. By the end of the essay I should be able to draw an informed conclusion to this answer from my perspective.

The emergence of leaders.

When discussing leadership, there are two main theories that can be adopted. Firstly, there is the situational approach, which is unsurprisingly concerned with the situation. There may, for example, be a person within a business environment whom is tasked with controlling and leading a group of colleagues. It is therefore when the leadership task is viewed as a conscience process i.e. "I have been tasked as leader, I must lead the group".
Alternatively, the theory of the trait approach is where the individual does not assume the role as leader consciencely, or put another way, they are born as a natural leaders and will often assume the role of leader in an anonymous situation, already possessing the correct qualities for the position.

The Trait approach studies.

It was once attempted to try and determine what qualities were most common in someone thought to be a natural leader. In the test, a number of characteristics were proposed as being advantageous, these were height, weight, appearance and intelligence. Further studies by Gibb in 1969 suggest that the typical leader is only slightly more intelligent than the average group leader. Gibb also concluded that leaders are neither predominantly authoritarian nor equalitarian, but an equilibrium between the two. It resulted that the findings were not conclusive and that leaders do not consistently possess the same particular types of characteristics as each other, furthermore, they do not always possess entirely different characteristics to those of the non-leaders i.e. the group members. The difficulty to come to a precise conclusion was such that many psychologists gave up trying to find the answer. Research in more recent years in a business environment has found that leaders do differ from group members, or at least more conclusively than  Gibb in 1969.
In 1991, Kirkpatrick and Locke  identified that flexibility was a key trait in the leader's personality, this is probably because the leader must be able to balance the wishes of group members, and grant them c...

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