Coursework Brief Assignment Question: Critically evaluate to what extent the proposition that leaders are exceptional individuals remains central within leadership studies. You should a) base your...

Running Head: HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT                    1
HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT                            12
HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
Table of Contents
Introduction    3
Background    3
Western Leadership    4
The Mainstream of Leadership Studies    4
Critical Studies of Leadership    5
The History of Leadership Thought    7
Leadership Theories    7
Leadership Styles and Followers    8
Servant Leadership    8
Transformational Leadership    9
Dispersed Leadership    10
Leadership Models and Framework    10
Private Sector Frameworks    10
Public Sector Frameworks    11
Conclusion    11
References    12
Introduction
This paper will critically evaluate to what extent the proposition that leaders are exceptional individuals remains central within leadership studies. For this, it will be discussed the background study of leadership, including Western leadership. Further, it will be highlighted how it remains central in the context of the mainstream of leadership studies and Critical studies of leadership. This paper will also discuss Critical studies of leadership and theories. Leadership Models and framework with dispersed leadership.
Background
Leadership has been championed as a critical force for good by management experts and practitioners alike in recent decades. Instead, I believe that the current focus and expectations on leaders and leadership necessitate an examination of why we have arrived at this conclusion. Michel Foucault believes that we must challenge the past in order to think differently about the present and future in his investigations into the structure and construction of expert-driven discourses.
'Visionary' (Bennis & Nanus, 1985), 'charismatic' (House, 1977) and 'transformational' attributes are widely associated with effective leadership in the modern Western world (Yaslioglu & SelenayErden, 2018). Over the previous quarter-century, this type of strong, powerful and appealing leadership has become the accepted benchmark for management success. The notion that we need 'leadership' to tackle any difficulty a group, organisation, or society encounters has become natural and common.
People in leadership positions are expected to have virtually superhuman capacity and performance under the current leadership model. This puts immense strain on individuals attempting to match these standards, as well as encouraging vanity in those who have grown to regard themselves in such lofty terms. It also fosters the notion that the great majority of individuals are weak in some manner, incapable of conquering obstacles without the help of a select few (Mango, 2018).
“Leadership has evolved to be considered as the most critical aspect in the success of organisations, with systems and procedures viewed as significant drivers of organisational performance (Seidel et al., 2019). Leadership, on the other hand, has not always been held up as the solution to all problems; in the early twentieth century, management experts paid little attention to leadership. How did we get to the point where we are now, at the polar opposite of modernity's basic assumptions?”
Western Leadership
“For thousands of years, the Western world has studied and analysed leadership. Moral and political philosophers, historians and practitioners were the primary sources of scholarly work on leadership from ancient times until recently. The majority of leadership literature is now produced by social scientists and practitioners.
Prescriptive or normative views of what leaders should do have dominated philosophical discussions. Many biographies of leaders have been written by historians, with a concentration on kings, political leaders and military commanders (Shaturaev & Bekimbetova, 2021). This literature is anecdotal, quirky and occasionally hagiographic or self-serving. The dominant approach to understanding leadership is now social science and this knowledge is primarily obtained through quantitative research methods.”
The Mainstream of Leadership Studies
“'New leadership' theories stress a leader's 'visionary,' 'transformational,' and 'charismatic' attributes and behaviours. Many great religious figures, including Jesus, Mohammed and Buddha, were undergoing transformations (Seidel et al., 2019). The concept of leadership is given as a combination of intellectual, moral and emotional impact that motivates followers to pursue the leader's aims with altruistic passion and dedication. “Hard data regarding the influence of leadership is shockingly and tantalisingly difficult to come across,” said Breevaart and Zacher (2019). The portrayal of leadership as 'natural, normal, modern and progressive' effectively discourages the examination of various forms of leading.
Any deviation from this norm is regarded as a failure on the part of the manager/leader. Ideas that assert the naturalness and normalcy of inequality between people should be treated with extreme caution. In conventional leadership studies, the authority of leaders is nearly often considered as an unproblematic power imbalance. Leadership's impacts are seldom compared to other methods of organising collective effort, such as collaboration (Tourish, 2020). As a result, although professing to be impartial and unbiased, mainstream leadership studies are highly subjective and politicised.”
Critical Studies of Leadership
“Critically informed research has uncovered a recent trend of ‘talking up' the worth and influence of leadership in a way that simplifies and hence distorts reality. A romantic bias, as established by Meindl et al. (1985), leads to a predisposition to ascribe favourable outcomes to leadership, despite evidence that other factors were at play (Newstead et al., 2021). They claim that this prejudice creates a societal norm that affects our perceptions of leadership.
Managers have a tough time expressing what they truly do as leaders, according to Breevaart and Zacher (2019). Female leaders had to hide their sexuality or participate in behaviours that conformed to stereotyped expectations of women, according to Sinclair, because of gendered assumptions and expectations ingrained in conventional understandings of leadership. Kanat-Maymon et al. (2020) discovered that current leadership discourse is a seduction exercise, in which...