Bright and Dark Side of the Romance of Leadership

Question: Critically evaluate the bright and dark side of the romance of leadership? Answer: Arnold Henry Glasgow explained that people often think that credit and earning recognition matters. But its not about the credit or the earning it is mostly about taking the blame and sharing the credit. It is a leader who leads his group or team, so he is responsible for all the actions and reactions of his team. Both the input and output of any operation is decided by a leader, one wrong decision and that leads to a low productivity. Low productivity or getting lower than the expected is considered as a failure. Its not about blaming but to rectify, to comprehend what has gone wrong with the Endeavour a leader takes the initiative to find out. On that very step the leader finds out what has been wrong, the procedure, the people or the product itself. A leader leads; he is being followed by his subordinates. Thus a leader has to be careful in every step, because he is being trusted and blindly followed by his group men. (Northouse, 2004). There starts the impending journey of leadership. This is where the Romanticism of leadership is experienced. The quality approach on leadership which attempts to comprehend when and why we become familiar with the leaders is known as Romance of leadership. It deals with appreciating the leaders for influencing and changing our societies. Leadership has both optimistic and pessimistic outcomes in an organization. If an individual is considered to be a successful leader then his or her personal difficulties and poor organizational performance may be ignored for a certain period. This defines the Romance of Leadership and criticizes the approach of bright and dark side of romance of leadership (sage publications, Inc, 2012). The Romance of Leadership was introduced as one of the overtly follower centric approach to balance many leader centric approaches that dominated leadership research and practices. The Romance of Leadership approach helps to highlight the esteem, stature, magnetism, and heroism attached to diverse forms of leadership. Leadership is a preferential illustrative class for understanding political, organizational, military, social and regional outcomes. Meindl theorist in Leadership found out that a heroic conception of what leaders and their leadership is virtually a concept that will remain beyond grasp of the best scientific outcomes, particularly since the initial purpose of scientific research is to technically resolve the mysteries (Bligh, Kohles and Pillai, 2011). Social inference is what leadership means. Construing leadership as an explanatory category, Calder and Pfeffer treated leadership as one of the ways in which people understand the causes of important organizational event s and outcomes. In this perspective, leadership events like successions appears to be largely symbolic, spreading a sense of comprehending and manage over critical problems that require explanation and demonstration and receptive action. In procedure of socially construing organizational situations, the romance of Leadership conflicts that the notion of leadership is raised unprovoked status and significance. So far, the discussion has always been about what good qualities a leader should possess and the fantasies of leadership. There also exist the dark sides of leadership. Researchers also provided their overview on Destructive leadership. (Meindl and Ehrlich, 1987). By focusing hugely on characteristics of the leader, they stated that leaders are responsible for harmful outcomes in organization. Many conducted surveys suggested that aversive leadership and destructive leadership more broadly is a complex process resulting from the confluence of leaders, followers, and the environ ment of the organization. Destructive leadership includes a wide array of labels describing various forms of harmful leader behavior. Tepper defined abusive supervision as the degree to which superintendents engage in the continual display of hostile oral and non verbal reactions, not including physical contact. To this context another concept coined as leader bullying was explained by Buckley and Harvey as deliberately chosen diplomacy of influencing by leaders intended to portray a specific image and place goals in a compliant, ineffective position goals. (Thoroughgood, Hunter and Sawyer, 2010) With the recognition of dark side of leadership as a significant branch of research, many researchers have sought to discuss caustic brands of leadership in terms of negative life ideas and dispositional traits such as narcissism. Narcissism is a psychological perception of being in the pursuit of gratification of vanity or egoistic. This is in general considered as a negative trait, but now a days modern concept says narcissism may be considered as a positive trait to a certain level. Professor Dr. Emily Grijalva (from University of Illinois psychology) found that narcissists have a gaudy sense of their own self-importance and an embellished need for others respect. She also explained that generally narcissist can be anxious with belief and fantasies of their massive power, attractiveness, intelligence and success. Through her research she found that although narcissist are more expected to appear as group leaders but after a certain point it is possible to undermine a persons effic iency being a leader. (PhD, 2015) In a research presented by Professor Mark Stein, it has been found that a self centered leader can actually possess two kinds of narcissist behavior those whose poise results to benefit the organization, and those whose egotism is actually disparaging. The research states that those with firm tendencies of narcissism are often drawn to leadership profile, out of a need for positions and power. Interestingly this trait can be both favorable and destructive for an organization (ScienceDaily, 2015). Although psychologists have immense awareness about leadership, people who make resolutions about genuine leaders seems largely to disregard their accumulated perception. Leadership is persuasion and not dominance; people who can entail others to do obeying because of their powers, are not leaders. Leadership is not a mandate acquisition of the authority; it approaches when others keenly adopt, for a certain period of time, the goals of a group as their own. So leadership is all about problem solving, organizing, clarifying, informing, monitoring, networking, team building and rewarding that is expected from the first line of leaders. (Hogan, Curphy and Hogan, 1994). References Bligh, M., Kohles, J. and Pillai, R. (2011). Romancing leadership: Past, present, and future.The Leadership Quarterly, 22(6), pp.1058-1077. Hogan, R., Curphy, G. and Hogan, J. (1994). What we know about leadership: Effectiveness and personality.American Psychologist, 49(6), pp.493-504. Meindl, J. and Ehrlich, S. (1987). THE ROMANCE OF LEADERSHIP AND THE EVALUATION OF ORGANIZATIONAL PERFORMANCE.Academy of Management Journal, 30(1), pp.91-109. Northouse, P. (2004).Leadership. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage. PhD, R. (2015).Is Narcissism an Essential Leadership Trait?. [online] Psych Central.com. Available at: https://psychcentral.com/news/2014/01/16/is-narcissism-an-essential-leadership-trait/64585.html [Accessed 10 Feb. 2015]. sage publications, Inc, (2012).Sage reference. [online] https://www.sagepub.com/. Available at: https://www.sagepub.com/northouse6e/study/materials/reference/reference9.2.pdf [Accessed 10 Feb. 2015]. ScienceDaily, (2015).When good leaders turn bad: the dual face of narcissistic leadership. [online] Available at: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/05/140528103314.htm [Accessed 10 Feb. 2015]. Thoroughgood, C., Hunter, S. and Sawyer, K. (2010). Bad Apples, Bad Barrels, and Broken Followers? An Empirical Examination of Contextual Influences on Follower Perceptions and Reactions to Aversive Leadership.Journal of Business Ethics, 100(4), pp.647-672.