The context around you

The situational theories that emerged in the mid-20th century reflected how different situations require different leadership styles. Situational leadership perspectives see that the situation defines the leader. Leadership emerges when an individual meets the needs of the situation. In the 1970s, Dansereau, Grain, and Haga (1975) offered a leader-member exchange theory, which proposed that leaders use different styles with different members within the same group.

James MacGregor Burns’ (1978) transformational leadership theory rekindled trait theory in the 1980s by offering a perspective that sees

• a transformational leader is an individual with a unique set of attributes for driving significant change in organizations and society, and
• a transactional leader is an individual with different characteristics for organizing tasks and people to accomplish goals.

Around the same period, scholars started to see leadership as an interaction between followers and leaders. This perspective produced followership theory, which considers the role that followership plays in good leadership (Kelley, 1996).TT