EFFECTIVE LEADERSHIP Essay

Practice has shown that neither the approach of personal qualities, nor behavioral approach has been able to identify the logical relationship between a leader’s personal qualities or behavior on one hand and efficiency on the other. More recent studies have shown that the efficiency of leadership can depend significantly on additional factors. These situational factors include needs and personal qualities of subordinates, the nature of a task, requirements and impacts of the environment, as well as information available for the leader. Therefore, the modern theory of leadership has appealed to the situational approach.
In our understanding of leadership, it is very important to determine, what styles of behavior and personal qualities are most appropriate in certain situations. In situational leadership theory, the emphasis has shifted from the leader’s qualities to the analysis of the situation and the object of management, that is, leadership emerges as a response to the demand of a situation. In other words, this approach minimizes the role of activity of personality and its traits, and presents circumstances as the higher power.
With all the obvious disadvantages of the situational theory discussed in the chapter (Yukl, 2010), its progressive nature is in the recognition of the fact that it is not only certain personality traits which is important for leadership, but other factors as well. Thus, in our opinion, it is quite reasonable to refer to the number of situational variables the size and structure of an organization, the type of activity performed, individual peculiarities of members of the organization (their expectations in particular), the time of decision-making, the psychological climate of the organization, etc.
2. Generally, social exchange theory of Homans considers social behavior as personal contact between two individuals, in which the rewards or loss determine further behavior. In other words, social exchange theory rests on the assumption that people will form and maintain relationships, if they believe that the reward they obtain from these relationships exceeds the expenditures. The more well-known concept of Blau considers social exchange in the terms of “leadership”, “authority” and “structure”, which describe the relations of power and subordination in formal and informal organizations (Yukl, 2010; Mitchell & Cropanzano, 2005).
From our point of view, social exchange theory can be useful when being considered as a theory of behavior choice. Choosing from a range of certain alternatives, people need to rely on a certain standard, which helps them to evaluate the relative value of these alternatives. We can also see that the central place in this theoretical system belongs to the category of “equitable treatment” defined as the proportionality of contributions and results of activities of the participants of the interaction. Therefore, the theory of equitable exchange has stimulated a large number of experimental studies in the field of management policies, and the major problems studied basing on this theory are the impact of excessive or insufficient payment on the perception of relationships, the impact of the degree of proportionality of contributions and results on different forms of distribution, etc.
Although the discussion of social exchange theory within the dyadic relationship has benefited from the simplicity which they give, a common opinion is that it requires expansion in the application to more complex types of social interactions. One of these expansions has become the development of the equity theory, which states that when assessing the satisfaction with one’s own success, the success of other people is taken into account. Social exchange theory can also be considered an important step in connection of micro-processes with macro-structures.