Relational Approaches To Leadership Analysis

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The idea of studying and researching what makes a leader is a fairly recent development. In class we learned about and discussed many different approaches to leadership, starting from the oldest to the newest ideas about leadership. Some of them includes Leadership Communication Styles, Traits Approach, Functional Approach, Situational Approach, Relational Approach, and Transformational Approach to Leadership. Of these approaches that we examined, for this day and age, I think the Relational Approach to leadership is the most applicable, useful, and beneficial.
If one looks back at the history of mankind, we see many different ways of leaders communicating with their followers. One of the ways we have to examine these patterns we observe
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This approach makes the argument “that it is the ability to communicate like a leader that determines leadership” (Hackman & Johnson, 2013, pg. 87). The earliest work done with this approach was in 1938, by Chester Barnard, he looked at communication as the central function of an organization. Soon after the Functional Approach around the 1950’s the Situational Approach started to appear. The Situational Approach states “the differences in leadership style might be attributed to…any one of a number of other situational factors” (Hackman & Johnson, 2013, pg. 77). This is basically saying that given the different attributes of different leaders, they will have different levels of success when it comes to specific …show more content…
90). An important finding of this approach is the distinction of an in-group and an out-group and the perks that come from being in the in-group (Hackman & Johnson, 2013). The perks are seen for both the leader and the followers in this group such as high levels of trust, more productivity and mutual influence (Hackman & Johnson, 2013). The last approach that was developed is called the Transformational Approach. This approach has Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs in-grained into it. A transformational leader goes “beyond those basic needs to satisfy a follower’s higher-level needs” (Hackman & Johnson, 2013, pg. 100). More specifically this approach focuses on the self-esteem needs and the self-actualization needs of the followers (Hackman & Johnson, 2013). The goal of this approach is to develop the followers into leaders themselves (Hackman & Johnson,