Concluding Segment

Hello. I’m Dr. Christian Harrison. And welcome to the concluding segment of the video, modern paradigms of leadership. A critical insight into contemporary theories and concepts. I hope you enjoyed your time watching this video, because I definitely did.

In this video, we looked at five modern theories of leadership. The first theory we examined is called the implicit leadership theory. We looked at leadership from the lens of the followers. Scholars that follow this paradigm believed that rather than focus on what you can change, rather than focus on the behavior, leadership is about how followers perceive you.

If followers perceive you to be a leader, then you’re a leader. So we looked at that in so much detail. We also looked at a typical example of a leader, based on the implicit leadership theory.

We went beyond that interesting theory, and we looked at a leader member exchange. In this theory, the focus is all on interaction. Most people, we have said that leadership should be about how you interact with your followers. And we looked at the different types of interactions and relationships.

We looked at the in-group and the out-group, and we said that leadership should aspire to have more people in the in-group. But there are shortcomings to this approach, if you can remember. And the major shortcomings to this approach was the fact that not everybody can be in the in-group. Most people in the out-group want to be in the in-group, but they might not be able to get into the in-group, and as a result of that, people have said it might lead to discrimination.

We went beyond leader members exchange, and we looked at charismatic leadership. What is charismatic leadership? A lot of people have said charisma is very important. Charisma emerged from the Greek word meaning the gift of Greece. When you think about leadership or leaders, people always look at charisma.

However, charisma may not be enough. Like we looked at within the shortcomings, most times, charisma might not be suitable in every situation. We have seen negative and also positive charisma. Do you need to have a charismatic leader when there is no crisis? Those are one of the shortcomings that we also examined.

And we went beyond charismatic leadership, and we looked at another form of leadership called the transactional leadership, leadership that should be transactional. One of the things that we learned from there is that, most of the time, leaders try to help or try to meet the interest of their followers. Leaders try to use rewards, extrinsic rewards, to motivate their followers.

This interesting theory tries to say that contingent rewards is very important. Also, you have a concept called management by exception as well. However, studies have said that transactional leadership may not be always appropriate, and specifically, when people are not motivated based on money.

People want other things. Some people want trust. Some people want respect. So you need another form of leadership that goes beyond transaction. Nevertheless, this form of leadership has been shown to be important and very good in improving performance.

And finally, we look at transformational leadership. This is the most researched form of leadership in today’s world. In the last 30 years, everybody is calling for a transformational form of leadership. And we looked at that in so much detail, and we examined the four I’s of transformational leadership. And we also looked at other things that incorporate transformational leadership.

We said, of course, like every other theory, it has its own shortcomings. And the major shortcoming of transformational theory is this, it takes us back to the trait approach, whereby leaders are born and not made. A lot of people believe that you need to be transformational, but sometimes you don’t need to. If there is no change involved, it makes transactional look bad.

So I’ve examined all these theories, and I believe that you now know so much about these five modern theories of leadership. But nevertheless, you need other resources. And there are other resources I believe that, if you use with this video, it’ll be very useful in learning much more about these paradigms.

First is my book titled Leadership Theory and Research, A Critical Approach to New and Existing Paradigms. That would help you learn more about these theories of leadership. And also, there are resources and articles that you can see on the screen. I’m glad that you’ve been able to watch this video, and I’m sure that it will help you on your leadership journey. Thank you.