Analysis of Leadership Definitions and Biographical Leadership

There are three parts to this week’s Critical Thinking Assignment paper.

Part I:

An important concept for this week’s study is that no single, standard definition of leadership exists.  We can trace the history of how leadership has been defined and redefined by scholars and managers.  Page III of this week’s lecture provides insight into an exercise that may be useful for individuals wanting to understand their own leadership definitions:  constructing a biographical leadership explanation.  Western (2013) [required reading] offered a personal example of a leadership explanation through the author’s lens; Western also describes the exercise as “locating oneself.”

Begin the Week 1 Critical Thinking Assignment by composing your personal biographic leadership explanation. You may use Western’s format or another that is supported by the literature or that fits your career purpose.

Place the biographical leadership explanation in Appendix A of the paper.

Part II:

Create an historical overview of selected leadership definitions by constructing a time-line figure illustrating how leadership definitions varied over time.  The time-line will span three decades and include a minimum of three (3) definitions from different sources that are then positioned across the time-line.

Place the time-line and definition overview in Appendix B of the paper.

Part III:

Develop an analytic essay* exploring how your leadership explanation was informed by time and by different leadership definitions. That is, decompose and extract elements from your biographical explanation and determine if and where the elements might be related to the time-line and definitions. 

Within the analytic paper, reference Appendices A and B.

Include a conclusion based on findings and insights related to what influenced your personal leadership assumptions and experiences.

Requirements:

1. Support your response with research from at least four scholarly sources and, in addition, you may use the required course readings.
2. Your paper should be three to four pages in length, not counting the required title and reference pages and appendices.
3. Your paper must be formatted according to the APA Writing Format.
4. Review the grading rubric below to understand how you will be graded on this assignment. Reach out to your instructor if you have questions about the assignment.

• *Resources for explanations of analytic papers are found in the ORG561 Toolkit 1.0*