Emergent Leadership vs. Assigned Leadership

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culled from:leadershiparticles.com

Bass' Theory of Leadership

Bass' theory of leadership states that there are three basic ways to explain how people become leaders (Stogdill, 1989; Bass, 1990). The first two explain the leadership development for a small number of people. These theories are:

    Some personality traits may lead people naturally into leadership roles. This is the Trait Theory.
    A crisis or important event may cause a person to rise to the occasion, which brings out extraordinary leadership qualities in an ordinary person. This is the Great Events Theory.
    People can choose to become leaders. People can learn leadership skills. This is the Transformational or Process Leadership Theory. It is the most widely accepted theory today and the premise on which this guide is based.

Total Leadership

What makes a person want to follow a leader? People want to be guided by leaders they respect and who have a clear sense of direction. To gain respect, they must be ethical. A sense of direction is achieved by conveying a strong vision of the future.

When people are deciding if they respect you as a leader, they do not think about your attributes, rather, they observe what you do so that they can know who you really are. They use this observation to tell if you are an honorable and trusted leader or a self-serving person who misuses authority to look good and get promoted. Self-serving leaders are not as effective because their employees only obey them, not follow them. They succeed in many areas because they present a good image to their seniors at the expense of their workers.
Be           Know           Do

The basis of good leadership is honorable character and selfless service to your organization. In your employees' eyes, your leadership is everything you do that effects the organization's objectives and their well-being. Respected leaders concentrate on (U.S. Army, 1983):

    what they are [be] (such as beliefs and character)
    what they know (such as job, tasks, and human nature)
    what they do (such as implementing, motivating, and providing direction).

The Two Most Important Keys to Effective Leadership

According to a study by the Hay Group, a global management consultancy, there are 75 key components of employee satisfaction (Lamb, McKee, 2004). They found that:

    Trust and confidence in top leadership was the single most reliable predictor of employee satisfaction in an organization.
    Effective communication by leadership in three critical areas was the key to winning organizational trust and confidence:
        Helping employees understand the company's overall business strategy.
        Helping employees understand how they contribute to achieving key business objectives.
        Sharing information with employees on both how the company is doing and how an employee's own division is doing.

So in a nutshell — you must be trustworthy and you have to be able to communicate a vision of where the organization needs to go. The next section, Principles of Leadership, ties in closely with this key concept.