Leadership: Three Theories, Three Centuries Term Paper

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e. leadership (Pruyne, 2001, p. 6), but also that "determining how to abstract a set of leadership concepts that apply across contexts without sacrificing an understanding of how the conditions and qualities involved in leadership vary among those same contexts" remained elusive (Pruyne, 2001, p. 7). Experts provided extended series of examples, mostly from the 20th century, demonstrating how leadership characteristics change over time and vary with context. Therefore future, 21st-century leaders should learn from the confused, sometimes contradictory and still evolving historical development of the concept "leadership," in order to distill the useful concepts from mistakes and temporary analytical fads. What seems to persist from the development of leadership theory over the last three centuries, is that leaders can be made rather than born regardless of inherited socio-economic status, and that while certain traits may be more prominent or apparent in those who find themselves in positions of leadership however defined, those traits probably exist in many who never encounter opportunities for leadership deployment, and so environmental factors probably affect how those characteristics or traits are expressed or displayed.

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In democracies for example, stakeholder and electorate preferences and objectives constrain who occupies public office and thus exercises leadership, in governance at least, although business leaders may have more personal leeway if they are the controlling entrepreneur. Therefore even the same attributes may apply in different ways in different environments depending on the context of the call to lead. What would be inadvisable for the 21st century would be to adopt the paradigms and characteristics derived from 18th, 19th and 20th century political theory, before a clear concensus emerges on just what leadership actually is. As environmental conditions change seemingly more quickly every year, the result may be an evolving, path-dependent context where no two leaders are identical enough to derive boiler-plate, bullet point "five forces" -- type schema for the political and leadership sciences......

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https://www.aceyourpaper.com/essays/leadership-three-theories-three-centuries-66563