How might theories and ideas from social psychology help create ‘better’ leaders - Essay Assignment Help

The term social psychology is described as a branch of psychology which entails those elements of intellectual life that connects to intrapersonal communication and events in common (McGarty & Haslam, 1997 as cited in Bandawe, 2010). The idea of leadership is very old and includes people who tried to form groups and manage different individuals for the achievement of particular tasks. Fiedler (1967) stated that leadership is a social relationship in which authority and control are unequally allocated and there is only one individual who dominates and controls the performance of the rest of the group (as cited in Asrar-ul-Haq & Anwar, 2018). According to Andersen (2016), leaders are those individuals who encourage, inspire, and identify their workers to get a task done on time and accomplish the anticipated outcomes. Leaders embrace multiple leadership qualities to encourage and inspire the employees. There are three main social psychological theories about leaders:

According to Asrar-ul Haq & Kuchinke (2016), A transformational leader commonly directs his employees by offering them an idea. That person is more of an alluring leader and tries to stimulate his employees through his ideology and charm. This concept was given by J.M. Burns in 1978. According to Bass (1985), The transactional leadership behavior creates the bases for stipulating prospects, settling contracts, explaining duties and offering the awards and acknowledgment to attain the set goals and aims as well as the predicted performance among leaders and workers (as cited in Hussain et al. 2017). The third type of leadership style is a Laissez-Faire leadership in which the leader does not participate in making any decisions. They are usually unenthusiastic to take any decision and ignores multiple situations, in which, there are chances to face different challenges. Leaders, who adopt laissez-faire leadership style, do not give criticism to their workers. They do not even use incentives or other ways to please the desire of their workers. Due to which the followers will get dissatisfied, useless and lazy in their tasks (Asrar-ul Haq & Kuchinke, 2016). Lee et al. (2015) states that leadership notions can also be reflected as an attitude such as, decisions relating to the high standard of leader-follower relationships can be considered a relationship approach. However, employee leadership reveals followers' approach to the extent that their leader reflects this style. In short, he says that approaches can be a valuable guideline for estimating leadership concepts and eventually leads to leadership efficiency. The positive influence of transformational leadership in a company’s environment surveyed by Du, Swaen, Lindergreen, and Sen (2013); they conducted a research study associating leadership styles with corporate intrapersonal responsibilities in businesses. The research entailed 400 corporates with different business demographics with participants in positions ranking from chairperson and executives to general management and administration. After completing their research, they concluded that when transformational leaders were appointed in a corporation, the businesses encouraged corporate social duty which resulted in companies improving their relationship with the customers and also the employees. The attributes of transformational leadership are that the leader will motivate and encourage his team or employees to get good results and would be cool minded whereas the transactional leader will provide with incentives if the provided task is done by the team or his employees which also encourages the people to perform well to receive the rewards. 

The Leadership Continuum:

 (Source: Northhouse, 2016 as cited in Kouvach, 2018)

To link these two types of leaders with real-life examples a case study would be explained in the literature review given by Ali et al. (2017) in ‘Influence of Leadership Styles in Creating Quality Work Culture’. In this case study, a survey was conducted in the financial institutions and the sample size was 100 participants who were in the top tier of the company that is from managers to the people in management. Questionnaires and interviews were conducted with multiple executives of the company. The sample size was randomly selected, the questionnaire had three parts that included demographic outline, leadership, and standard of work culture. The data was interpreted through descriptive statistics, frequency distribution, regression analysis, reliability analysis, and correlation. This case study attempted to find the recent tradition of job culture at financial establishments and also to recognize which leadership styles can generate high standard employment culture. On the bases of the results of this case study, the following findings may be précised.