*PhD., Department of Political Science, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ile, Osun State, Nigeria
**Department of Local Government Studies, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ile, Osun State, Nigeria
Online published on 14 November, 2013.
The issue of leadership in human society and its various terrains has attracted series of scholastic and intellectual attentions. These attentions have deep-seated historical pedigree.
The concept has become a key concern in organizations within both the private and public sectors of polities and corporate settings all over the world in that everything begins and ends with the issue of leadership and its types. It determines the successes or failures of any human endeavour and, such is determined by the type of leadership in place.
Against this background, this paper deals with the concept of leadership using a dialectical approach – [though not the Hegelian philosophical type of unification] – in the quest for a synthesis of its various components. The paper seeks a further retooling and/or recoiling of the hitherto mutually inclusive components of leadership and its various types.
Using the conceptual analysis of the term “leadership” as the point of departure and, giving analytical credence to the leadership sustainability of followership confidence with insights on servant leadership and other theoretical constructs on the subject matter of the main focus [e.g., McGregor's Theories X and Y; Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs etc].
In the process, while examining the linkage between the concepts of leadership and power and, the latter's transformation into legitimate authority, the concept of change leadership which has gained a wider currency within the matrix of organizational and management studies and, its transcendental utility to the organizational terrains of various political economies and their landscapes was examined. This examination was done within the context of a change leadership being a key to large-scale sustainable organizational and political reform in the quest for human productivity, improved morale and micro and macro political self-fulfillment.
The paper concludes with the emphasis that the evocation of the concept of leadership, its types and/or styles, to alter the behaviours of others in groups and organizations in the quest for attainment of desired goals based on focused agenda setting will infinitely continue in our world, particularly at this period of the planetary phenomenon of globalization and its mondialization of human relational threads.
