Traditional vs. contemporary leadership

Introduction

Leadership has traditionally and up to date dominated in its position as one of the key features of an organization that is paramount to its existence success and continuity. Raelin (2003)present a clear definition of leadership as "one or more persons charged with the responsibility of selecting, equipping, training, and influencing follower(s) towards the achievement of the organization’s mission and objectives. The leader is responsible for causing their followers to enthusiastically and willingly expend physical, spiritual and emotional energy in a concerted, coordinated manner to achieve the goals of the organization" (Raelin, 2003). All the same, due to the increasing complexities, diversities and rapid changes in leadership models to suit the upgraded methods, leadership styles have changed from time to time. This paper is purposed to survey the differences between the traditional leadership and today’s forms of leadership. For a clear understanding, examples of each of leadership models that fall in each of the two categories will be cited.

Differences

The traditional leadership is coercive. There were few places for people to seek employment and as such, the employee had to fully submit to the coercion of the employer to avoid penalties like firing as it was not easy to secure another employment. This type of leadership is tyrannical and at no time were employees given a chance to air their view or disapprove a change. That means the communication was mostly downward, and the employee is there to receive instructions and perform as indebted without questions (Northhouse, 2010). The traditional leadership entailed a chain of command, or being subjected to top-level decision making, and more specifically, following someone with absolute power.

Apparently, traditional leadership in most cases family-based. A particular family was believed to possess leadership traits and powers to direct or lead others to destiny. In any way, traditional leaders were believed to be born leaders gifted with traits like physical strength, high intelligence, commanding voices, and the all too obvious, aggressive personalities. Leadership was thus believed to be hereditary and unless one was born from a certain family, he/she was not seen viable to lead. Another characteristic of the traditional leadership is that it was much entrusted to males who were believed to possess the all needed spheres of traits to guide than females (Raelin, 2003).

Contrary to the above, the contemporary leadership is based on mutual respect and teamwork. Though the leader expresses authority, he/she refrains exerting a lot of duress and compulsion but instead acts like a captain of the team. This leadership understands what needs to be done and will install means to illuminate the employees by way of encouragement; motivation and reward just to mention a few. Unlike the traditional leader, the contemporary leader works hard to ear respect and trust from employees. He is a team player and less a director. In any way, it does not discriminate upon gender lines.

Although heredity of leadership still features in today’s organizations especially the family-owned businesses, many are times when leadership is earned by merit or democratically, where the director may be appointed through voting. Here also, the communication is two-way; employee freely shares their opinions with superiors. The flicker of the theory of born leaders is somewhat overshadowed since today’s leadership is earned by competitiveness (certification and experience). A great leader is of today judged by his/her consistency in maintaining interpersonal communication through the building and upholding open, supportive, non-judgmental and collaborative relationships with employees and other organization (Northhouse, 2010).

Examples

Examples of contemporary leadership models may include charismatic, transformational and transactional leadership while traditional leadership models include trait model of leadership and behavioral model of leadership (Raelin, 2003).

Preference

I prefer the contemporary leadership model. That is because, it is a competitive world of business today and the best way to arm the organization is to implement methods of attaining and maintaining a competitive team (Northhouse, 2010). That can only be done by a leader who is ready to understand the employees. As can be seen above, the contemporary leadership model guarantees that.

References

Northhouse, P. G. (2010). Leadership; Theory and practice (5 ed.). USA: Sage Publications, Inc.

Raelin, J. A. (2003). Creating Leaderful Organizations: how to bring out leadership in everyone. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.

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