Leadership is one of the top subjects of study in the past, now, and in the future. Different approaches to leadership have been put forward up to the present day. As a concept, leadership has been studied with different aspects. One of these aspects is to examine leadership in terms of behaviors, which claims that it is certain types of behavior that make a leader effective or ineffective. Hence, it assumes that leaders are not born but made. According to this approach, leadership can be learned and modelled. This approach came out as a response to the inadequacies of traits approach of leadership and focused more on behaviors to define leadership. Ohio State studies, Michigan State studies, and Blake and Mouton studies are best representative of this approach.
TopIntroduction
As a term, leadership existed from the beginning of human history. The permanent settlement, co-existence and organization of communities brought along the need to manage. As, in general, people are social beings who live in groups and need each other to achieve particular aims, they need leaders who can direct these groups. Especially, in today’s ever changing management mentality, the need for leaders has been dramatically increased. Today every business, including hospitality industry, regardless of their scale, needs effective leaders to succeed. A good leader is required to effectively orient business operations. Being so significant, the issue of leadership has mostly been an important field of researches. As a result, leadership is still a popular topic for different disciplines and studies.
Leadership is generally defined as the skill to convince the others on specific objectives and emphasizes the relationship between rulers and ruled. Leadership is a process which focuses on the significance of interpersonal interactions. Leadership is mostly regarded as one of the most crucial factors in the success or failure of the institutions. Being so important, leadership has been one of the top study area by the academic researchers and businesses. A number of leadership theories came out along with increased publictions and studies. Different approaches to leadership have emerged to respond to “how leadership works, what makes leaders good, how to make leaders effective” and the like. The approaches to leadership are mainly categorized as traits approach, behavioral approach and contingency approach. Despite the fact that a considerable number of studies contributed to leadership theory, it has not been integrated yet. This is especially thought to result from new leadership theories being self-replicating of old theories (Uslu, 2019).
This chapter gives a brief historical overview of the term of leadership at the beginning. Then, it dwells on behavioral approaches to leadership. The behavioral leadership theory and the styles of behavioral leadership will be explained and discussed in detail. The behavioral leadership theory studies both in hospitality industry and other fields will be examined and the results will be evaluated. This chapter also aims to present suggestions both to business and academics.