CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

Background to the Study

Leadership is a vital element in the social relationship of groups at work. Groups need leaders and leaders need followers. Leadership is a dynamic process at work in a group whereby one individual oversee a particular period of time and in particular, in an organization context influence the other group members to commit themselves freely to the achievement of task or goals leadership is as old as man. There are many definitions of leadership which are as follows: Richard (1997) sees leadership as the act or process of influencing people so that they will strive willingly and or enthusiastically towards the achievement of the group mission. Ovwigho (2004) defines leadership as the process of getting things done through people Heinz (2005) on his part defined leadership as the influence, that is, the art or process of influencing people so that they will strive willingly and enthusiastically toward the achievement of group goals. Gareth (2002) defines leadership as the process by which an individual exerts influence over other people, inspires, motivates and directs their activities to help achieve group of organization goals. Management activities such as planning, organizing and decision making are dominant until the leader trigger the power of motivation in people and guide’s them towards goals and achievement.

To this end, leading is to guild conduct, direct and control. Leaders are individual who are able to exert organization goals (Gareth, 2000). They emerge to ginger a group to achieve their objectives with maximum application of its capabilities. They do not stand behind to push and produce but they place themselves before the group to facilitate progress and inspire the group to accomplish the organization goal. A good example is that of the orchestra leaders whose functions is to produce coordinated sound and correct tempo through integrated effort of the instrumentalist Leadership is not necessarily confine to one person, but may be sheared between members. A recent focus on the leader’s role in motivating members implies that they may counsel, support, help, persuade, or elicit the participation of others in some degree of goal settings. Leaders also manipulated, entice, reward, coerce or harangue. Although some researcher’s exclude some of those activities from the definition of leadership. Strictly speaking, Ricky (2002) sees leadership as a process, the use of non-coercive influence to shape the group or organizational goals and motivate behaviour towards the achievement of those goals and help define group or organization cultures and secondly, as a property, leadership initiates and maintains social structure. The social system is to speak “programmed” through leadership, understandably, leadership then should be a simple and parsimonious approach to understanding the larger society.

Leadership can have consequence for the lives and welfare of large members of people, therefore, those who are concerned with the political consequences of human action must be concerned with leadership. Leadership has an effect on the performance on any organization. It affect both the employees work performance and productivity of the organization. Employees at all level tend to evaluate their jobs and their organization according to how of leadership. That is behaviour that is being exercised by the manager or superior. For a leader to lead effectively, he needs to understand his subordinate and situation of the organization as a whole. Felder, Koontz, Likert and other have helped to clarify the specific relationship among leadership style and situational variables. In a nutshell, leadership relates to followership, people tend to follow those whom they see as a means of satisfying their needs and to have a sense of belonging.

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