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There has never been any time in human history throughout the world when effective leadership has been more necessary and more in demand. Today we are ushered into an era of globalization, which means that more than ever we need men and women with the vision, courage and integrity to lead our families, our communities, our organizations and to set examples for others to follow in any area in this world. Concerning the definition of leadership, there are numerous statements in all kinds of books as well as articles. For instance, in the book of Multiple Intelligences and
Leadership, Schemers defined leadership as the process of social influence in which one person can enlist the aid and support of others in the accomplishment of a common task, whereas Alan Keith regarded leadership as the action of creating a way for people to contribute to making something extraordinary happen. Certainly, leadership has several important and significant aspects that we should take into serious consideration if we want to form a personal definition of it. Trait theory of leadership began as early as Plat’s question of “What qualities distinguish an individual as a leader? N his masterpiece, Republic. Researchers in this field conducted over a hundred studies proposing a number of characteristics that distinguished leaders from non-leaders, like intelligence, dominance, adaptability, persistence, integrity, SEES (socioeconomic status), and self-confidence. However the other scholars refuted the idea by leading a series of qualitative reviews of the past studies which suggested that persons who are leaders in one situation may not necessarily be leaders in other situations.
And then leadership was no longer characterized as an enduring individual trait, as situational theory of adhering posited that individuals can be effective in certain situations, but not others. In a nutshell, what an individual actually does when acting as a leader is in large part dependent upon characteristics of the situation in which he functions. Accordingly, we are not capable of acquiring any meaningful as well as enduring definition of effective leadership unless a certain kind of circumstance is mentioned.
Furthermore, researchers found out that there are various sorts of leadership style, for example, like transactional and transformational leadership. The transactional leader is given power to perform certain tasks and reward or punish for the team’s performance. It gives the opportunity to the manager to lead the group and the group agrees to follow his lead to accomplish a predetermined goal in exchange for something else. And the transformational leader motivates its team to be effective and efficient.
This type of leader is highly visible and uses chain of command to get the Job done. Transformational leaders focus on the big picture, needing to be surrounded by people who take care of the details. Heartsickness relating to the intercultural aspect in the conception of effective leadership. For example, globalization leads us to consider how to gain a better understanding of the world and its various cultures, and the awareness of the need to develop competencies allowing those leaders to live and thrive in a complex, ever- changing, globalizes environment.
One of the major influences of globalization could be that many Coos in multi-nation concerns have got to aggressively reposition their companies to deal with the unparalleled cross-border trade and investment, continual and rapid change in genealogical advances, on-going shifts in global products and consumers, higher global standards in production and quality, and the inherent unpredictability in markets that characterize the complexity we call “globalization”.
Taking all the aforesaid researches and studies into consideration, the definition of effective leadership, for my part, would be that effective leadership, especially in global contexts or cross-culturally complex situations, is a multi-dimensional construct which includes six dimensions, respectively: cross-cultural relationship kills, traits and values, cognitive orientation, global business expertise, global organizing expertise, and visioning.
Those six competency dimensions can be conceptually divided into two groups: one group of competencies directly related to intercultural interaction at the person and small group level, cross-cultural relationships, cognitive orientation, traits and values (which are critical to expatriate effectiveness), and one group involving the mastery of more macro, global business knowledge and skills (global business expertise, global organizing expertise, visioning).