Analysis of Leadership Theories

Bill Miles, University of Phoenix

Abstract

Leadership theories have evolved in the last century to the point where they begin to be the basis for models that accurately describe the activities of leaders with good correlation to their success in some situations (Antonakis and House, 2002; Yukl, 2006). From the early trait theories to the modern theories of transformational leadership, each attempts to describe the behavior of successful leaders. The four theories that will be discusses in this paper are the leader-member exchange theory (LMX), path-goal theory, transactional-transformational theory, and the full-range leadership theory (FRLT).