HROB 2010 Lecture 4: Unit 4 - Style Approaches to Leadership

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Human Resources and Organizational Behaviour
• Course: HROB 2010
• Professor: Casey Cosgrove

Document Summary

The trait approach (chapter 2) emphasizes the personality characteristics of a leader, and the skills approach (chapter 3) emphasizes the leader"s capabilities. The style approach emphasizes the behaviour of the leader; what they do and how they act. It has been determined that leadership is composed of general kinds of behaviours: task behaviours. Help followers feel comfortable with themselves, with each other, and with the situation in which they find themselves. To analyze how individuals acted when they were leading a group, they had the followers complete questionnaires about their leaders where they had to identify the number of times their leaders engaged in certain types of behaviours. The first questionnaire, constructed from a list of 1800 items describing leader behaviour was narrowed down to a list of 150 called the leader behaviour description. The lbdq was further shortened to lbdq-xii by stogdill in 1963, becoming the most widely used instrument in leadership research.