The Importance of Personal Traits in a Leader: Most of the research on leadership has focused on personal characteristics and qualities. The philosophy on which this approach is based is that successful leaders have more (or less) certain traits than their values. Accordingly, the most appropriate way to examine leadership is to consider successful leaders and investigate how they differ in terms of personal characteristics and qualities. Physical factors such as height and weight, mental and verbal abilities, self-confidence, determination and similar factors are handled and examined one by one in this respect.
What is the Definition of Leadership? In our article, we talked about the concepts of natural and natural leader.
Research has been disappointing in showing that a wide variety of people with different personalities, backgrounds and educational backgrounds can make successful leaders. Only five percent of the qualifications in hundreds of studies were replicated in only a few of these studies. In short, although some information has been obtained about the “unchangeable” qualities of leadership and what kind of leadership different situations require, a sufficient consensus has not been reached in the results; It turns out that the findings cannot be generalized from one situation to another.
The Importance of Behavioral Traits in Leaders;
1. X, Y, and Z Assumptions:
According to this approach, a manager uses Administration type is shaped by that manager’s assumptions about people, for example, a manager who believes that people are generally “lazy” treats his subordinates the way they should treat lazy people. The social scientist named Mc Gregor put forward two assumptions about people and work, which can be considered as distant poles, and named them X and Y. Assumptions are described below.
Assumption X:
- Work is unpleasant for most people.
- Most people don’t want responsibility.
- Often people are not very creative in solving organizational problems.
- Motivation occurs only at physiological and safety levels.
- Most people need to be closely supervised and sometimes forced to achieve organizational goals.
Assumption Y:
- Work is as natural as fun if conditions are favourable.
- Self-control is an indispensable method in achieving organizational goals.
- Most people have the capacity to creatively solve organizational problems.
- Motivation also occurs at the levels of love, self-esteem, and self-improvement.
- If people are well motivated, they can be creative and self-directed in their work.
Then, according to the X assumption, people do not like to work, they avoid working whenever possible. For this, if the organizational goals are to be achieved, it is necessary to impose a strict control on people and threaten them with punishment. People who avoid taking responsibility prefer to follow the leaders and care most about the need for security.
The assumption Y is that it is as natural for a person to spend arm and brain power to work as playing or resting; that people for whom external control and punishment and threats are not the only way will exercise self-control to achieve their adopted goals; It is based on the notion that the presentation of rewards to direct ends will yield successful results, and that the typical person, when appropriate conditions, will not shy away from assuming responsibility but, on the contrary, desire responsibility.
According to Mc Gregor, since the effectiveness of the organization depends on the motivation and satisfaction of the employees in the organization, it can be argued that the managers who adopt the “Y assumption” will develop an environment that increases the effectiveness, on the other hand, there are famous advocates of the “X assumption”. However, it is not possible to verify either the X or Y assumption. The views put forward are far from empirical and cannot go beyond relying on the evidence that the two sides want to believe. Therefore, a new definition of personality, “Z hypothesis”, can be proposed. According to the «assumption Z»:
- Man is neither a devil nor an angel. However, they have the ability to think, decide and persevere.
- Man is neither inherently good nor bad; It can be prone to both good and evil.
- It is neither biology nor humanism that motivates man, it is the basic motivating position.
- Motivation occurs not by coercion or voluntarily, but by reason.
- It is necessary to consider people from an impartial point of view, not optimistic or pessimistic.
2. Democratic, Autocratic and Indifferent Leadership:
The general opinion is that those who adopt the X assumption are AUTOCRATIC, those who adopt the Z assumption are DEMOCRATIC, and those who adopt the Y assumption are the LOUD type leader. The success levels of these types of leaders and their relations with the working groups were also taken by researchers named Lipitt and White and examined with the following research method.
The researchers formed groups of ten-year-old boys and appointed a chairperson assigned to each group to exercise one of the following three types of leadership.
- Democratic Leadership: Group decisions are made by voting with what the majority says, participation is supported, criticism and punishments are kept to a minimum.
- Autocratic Leadership: All decisions are made by the president, children are kept under strict discipline and assigned to implement the prepared methods.
- Irresistible Leadership: The President does not interfere in almost anything and does not direct children’s work and play.
This and similar studies generally reveal that democratic leaders are more effective in terms of variables such as high job satisfaction, low turnover and low absenteeism. The main reason why the democratic type is more effective is an organization and an organization that is realized by valuing people as human beings. AdministrationIt is a social obligation that creates a social obligation on these people, as a result of which the person feels obliged to fulfill their wishes. Participation in decision making will lead to greater job engagement. A democratic debate, on the other hand, leads to the preservation of communication and group unity. A joint decision is also enforced by group pressure; this gradually affects success. Through participation, the ideas and skills of individuals are learned and usefully used by the group.
Various criticisms are made of the “behavioral” approaches. The most important of these is this.
Although the general opinion is that democratic leadership achieves the most successful results in organizational management, there is actually no consensus on which leadership type is the most effective. While some research results indicate that the leader type oriented towards interpersonal relations is successful, some other researches have revealed that task-oriented leadership will lead to more effective results; On the other hand, some other studies have shown that those who score high on both dimensions will be good leaders.
The reason why the results are so variable is that it has not been taken into account how the work and the related environment affect the management style. The problem is an ‘audit’ problem, and it is certain that different business environments create different audit requirements. In short, which type of leadership will produce more successful results depends on the environment (position or situation). What is important is the reconciliation of the leadership need in the position with the leader’s control style; that it is in harmony. This understanding gave rise to the approach called “positional” or “situational”.