The core leadership competencies

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: 1,0, University of Applied Sciences Berlin, course: Soft Skills & Leadership Qualities, language: English, abstract: Leadership and leadership competencies have been of great interest throughout history. Until today many theories have been developed to identify effective leaders and thus enhance business success.In the 20th century, the efforts for a socio-scientific and empirically proven research on leadership strongly intensified, resulting in trait theory of leadership in the 1920s. Trait theory subsumes all approaches of leadership research, which ascribe the decisive meaning to the leader's personality. It revealed that leaders scored higher in the areas of intelligence, success in school, reliability, in acceptance of responsibility, activity and social integration, drive, self-confidence, socio-economic status in comparison to non-leaders. Despite of lacking empirical evidence for the validity of trait theory, it is nowadays still widely valued in the practice of corporate management, especially by those who hold leading positions and it should be considered along with other situational or behavioral variables. Leadership competencies show in the areas of disposition, of management and of human resources. In the area of disposition, the leader has to be able to make well-evaluated decisions. Moreover, a good leader must be able to communicate ...