Do Good Leaders Need to Be Intelligent

2527 Words11 Pages
Running head : DO GOOD LEADERS NEED TO BE INTELLIGENT ? Do Good Leaders Need to Be Intelligent ? Sana Karker Vrije University June 10, 2013 Number of words : Sana.karker@unil.ch Student number : 2518449 DO GOOD LEADERS NEED TO BE INTELLIGENT ? Abstract Keywords : emotional intelligence, leadership effectiveness, tranformational leadership style, transactional leadershipstyle DO GOOD LEADERS NEED TO BE INTELLIGENT ? Do good leaders need to be intelligent ? Both intelligence and the notion of leadership are broad terms that can be understood in differents ways. According to the psychologists Schmidt and Hunter (1998, 2000), intelligence can be define as « a broad mental capacity » to understand, think, resolve complex problems, and to learn quickly. This is the general definition of intelligence, but we can be intelligent in several manners. In this paper, we will focus on emotional intelligence and transformational intelligence. Regarding leadership, the notion has been defined as “a process of social influence in which one person can enlist the aid and support of others in the accomplishment of a common task" by the social psychologist M. Chemers (1997). However, a leader do not necessarily a good job. Great leaders are those who know how to motivate the others and how take the best in them. Effective leaders have powerful ideas and a good strategy. Furthermore, according to Goleman effective leaders are skilful to obtain results from their activities in a certain limited time that are relevant for the company and the stakeholders (2000). How do they do that ? To be able to answer to this question, we have to identify first the different styles of leadership. As well as intelligence, there are a few ways to act like a leader, and in this paper, we will focus on transactional leadership and transformational leadership. So first,
Open Document