Leadership

Leadership has been an integral virtue of an individual to be successful and effective in business, politics, sports or the military. It is stated by Howard (2005) that leadership can be regarded as an ability of an individual to influence a group of people to respond to organisational goals and as a means to enhance others’ performance by forming operative groups, motivating and giving a right direction to them. It means that, as far as a business is concerned, achieving an organisational objective can only be feasible when the organisation is operated in the way that every single individual has the same sense of purpose and seeks the same goal through an appropriate leadership. This essay discusses the essence of leadership and analyses various leadership styles, in particular, the leadership style that enabled Abraham Lincoln to become such an effective leader in accordance with the framework offered by Darling and Leffel (2010).
As mentioned above, leadership is based on a process where an individual has an impact on others to get them involved in a particular activity to direct them toward a desirable goal. According to Politis (2003), there exist various leadership styles, including transformational and transactional leadership. Firstly, transformational leadership is a style that focuses on motivating a group of people to improve their confidence and capability of dealing with tasks, while transactional leadership tends to concentrate more on making followers aware of what they have to do in order to achieve the desirable outcome and providing followers with an appropriate reward in regard to their level of performance. In addition to the various leadership styles, to gain a better understanding of leadership, it is necessary to distinguish the similarities and differences between management and leadership. Darling and Leffel (2010) explain that there is no question that both leadership and management are equally crucial, regardless of the type of