Leadership theory has long been critiqued for its lack of relevance to policy and practice, and the gap between the lived experience of leaders, the concerns and priorities of organisations, and leadership theorists. However, leadership theory has made a significant contribution to informing the understanding of what leadership is and how it ought to be performed. Empirical studies of police leadership in particular have typically conceptualised leadership through conventional theory. This chapter provides a critical insight into the conventional theories of trait, behavioural, situational and transformational theories. Through a consideration of these theories, we demonstrate how leadership has been conceptualised and studied over time. In doing so, we argue that conventional theory has a powerful legacy in relation to dominant discourses of police leadership, which perpetuate the person-centred assumptions about the nature and practice of police leadership.
As the first attempt to define and study leadership, many reviews of leadership theory begin with the trait approach. Popular in the 1920s and 1930s, the central premise of trait theory is that leadership is a product of individual characteristics or qualities. Leader traits refer to the ‘relatively stable and coherent integrations of personal characteristics that foster a consistent pattern of leadership performance across a variety of group and organisational situations’ (Zaccaro et al, 2004: 104). Traits are therefore understood as stable or consistent individual psychological or biological characteristics; these characteristics are measurable, temporally and situationally stable, and predict behaviours and outcomes (Antonakis, 2011). As such, trait-based leadership research focuses on the identification of the traits that predict an individual’s capacity for leadership.
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