Leadership Can the Definition of "Leadership" Be Essay

Leadership

Can the definition of "leadership" be applied to the concept of "management"? Leadership is defined as a process whereby an individual has influence over others in terms of achieving a predetermined, common goal. This paper takes the position that leadership should be part of what a manager / management does in a workplace environment; leadership is not limited to one category of employees, whether it be executives at the top of the latter of hierarchy, or a manager that serves as a foreman at the worker level. Leadership, in other words, is about leading, in any capacity on any particular assignment.

The Literature on Leadership and Managers

A peer-reviewed research article in the Journal of Business Psychology surveyed 9,942 managers working in 40 countries; and among the values the majority of those managers shared were "resourcefulness, change management, and building and mending relationships" Those are all leadership qualities (Gentry, et al., 2011, 18). The research article goes on to explain that because of globalization -- and the importance of foreign markets to many companies -- managers must become "…aware of the values espoused within their organization" and of the values their business partners and contemporaries share.

The manager today must also be a leader because he or she is working in a "global environment" that is populated by multinational corporations, and managers are frequently working with "…teams that are global and virtual in nature" (Gentry, 18). Hence, another leadership requirement -- according to Gentry -- is creating a "balance between personal life and work," which the author asserts is "…an important leadership competency for managers to have" (19).

On page 17, Bouteiller and Gilbert (2005, p. 28) argue that "managerial and leadership competencies are forced to converge mainly due to three reasons" (Gentry, 17). Those three include: a) due to the globalization of business there are important exchanges between managers and there is a "broadened publication of knowledge" and managers have to lead to achieve success; b) centralized systems require management leadership; and c) new concepts like "knowledge management" and "the intelligent enterprise" call for managers to lead (Gentry, 17).

Many organizations have implemented "leadership development programs" in order to "teach managers how to lead" (Kark, 2011, 507). Leadership development is a "…major source of sustainable competitive advantage" and hence many companies "place leadership at the core of their corporate culture" (Kark, 507). In other words, managers should be leaders, they can be leaders, and after training, they become leaders. If companies didn't believe that managers should also be leaders, they wouldn't launch programs that fine-tune leadership among managers. Kark writes that a "…recent comprehensive study" summarized 163 research studies on management training programs revealed that "some but not all" are effective at teaching managers and causing "behavioral change" which leads to "measurable organizational results" (508).

Put simply, leadership fits well into "…management theories since it focuses on the achievement of organizational goals," and it does that in a way society accepts (Bahreinian, et al., 2012). While the authors explain that some see "…management and leadership [as] the same," they go on to specifically point out that technically managers deal with how a task is accomplished while leadership "…determines what and why a task…