Leadership Research Prompt: Identify a leader that caused a positive social change in society.
Explain why this leader was important and how their contribution seeded other leaders to follow. Provide
concrete examples and textual support from primary and secondary sources. A deep analysis of your
research should be provided in the body of your research paper.
(A 2-3 page limit not including the bibliography, name/date/period right hand upper corner, 12 font,
Times Roman, double space, and no title page!)
Please review ideas about leadership styles below and circumstances that create leaders:
1. Concern for task. This behavior of leaders is represented by tangible and calculable achievement
linked to improved productivity, organization of labor and motivation of personnel.
2. Concern for people. This behavior of leaders is represented by the tangible concern for people
who work in the organization and desire to establish proper relations rather than to treat them as
units of production and corporate overhead. In this manner the leader establishes the “old boy
club” where each worker would become very committed. Thus, if needed, each worker would do
even more to make other ‘friends’ happy.
3. Directive leadership. This behavioral leadership style is represented by the leaders taking
frequently decisions for other, and expecting the others rather bluntly follow the instructions.
4. Participative leadership. This behavioral leadership style is represented by the leader’s desire to
engage people to the task and increase their commitment by allowing them to make decisions for
the company they work for.
There are four distinct leadership styles based on the four distinct situations as shown:
1. Telling (involves high task/low relationship behavior). This very style of leadership is
characterized by increased direction to subordinates and by increased attention to the corporate
goals/objectives. Hershey and Blanchard recommended this style for working with the new staff,
or in the situations when there is a great amount of routine and repetitive work that needs to be
achieved within a very short time span. Just like the Theory X, this approach states that
employees on their own cannot do a good job but need leadership supervision.
2. Selling (involves high task/high relationship behavior). The leader in this selling style of
leadership of Hershey and Blanchard is the one who ‘sells’ his ideas to the followers and makes
them ‘buy into’ these ideas. Selling is also called coaching approach to leadership and is used in
the situations when the employees are rather motivated and competent to do the job on their own,
yet indeed lack maturity to do the job right.
3. Participating (involves high relationship and low task behaviour). The leader in this participating
style of leadership shares the particular decision between the leader and the followers, with the
main leadership role being related to proper communication and facilitation of relationship
between the team members. The decision making process in this style is shared between the
leader and the followers where the leader conducts low direction and high support for the team
members. This style of management is used only when the people are competent to do the job yet
are not very motivated or mature do get it done. Here decision-making is shared between leaders.
Hershey and Blanchard called these people to have moderate to high maturity.
4. Delegating (involves low relationship/low task behavior between leaders and followers). This
style of leadership allows the leader to properly identify the situation, problem or issue and then
establish proper responsibility for the followers to carry out that particular task. This leadership
style is ideal for the companies that can boast competent and mature people who are motivated to
do the job on their own without much authoritarian participation (Kouzes, 142).