Are ‘Great’ Leaders Born or Made? Illustrate Your Arguments by Drawing on Examples of I) Leaders and Leadership; and Ii) Relevant Leadership Theories. Essay Example

The question of whether exceptional leaders are born with their strong leadership skills or if they develop them over their (sometimes quite short) lives has been a point of controversy for a long time, making many scientists scratch their heads. In the 20th century there was a strong belief that we are able to become whoever we want to, nowadays, due to rapid progress in genetics we are being told that our genes can make us prone to be more aggressive, have diabetes, cancer…but does it actually mean we can be predetermined to be good leaders as well? In order to make my essay as impartial as possible, I will analyze examples of leaders of different backgrounds, varying from Osama Bin Laden to Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesus of Nazareth. Apart of looking at the origin of their success as leaders I will employ various leadership theories that would best describe them. Before embarking on the subject, I feel it’s indispensable to clarify our definition of leadership which I assume to be simply the capability to influence a group of people toward the achievement of a certain vision (on this occasion we shall not consider the moral aspects of it). As the bible says: “Where there is no vision, the people perish”, which clearly states the importance of leaders. Let’s have a closer look at Jesus of Nazareth - the central figure of Christianity, religion which represents about a quarter to a third of the world's population and is the world's largest religion. Jesus is a perfect example of ‘Charismatic’ or ‘Transformational’ leadership.
He was able to inspire followers to transcend their own self-interests and cause profound and extraordinary effects on them. Without going into details that the scope of this essay is unfortunately not able to accommodate, we can see that Jesus perfectly fits into trait theories of leadership. The 4 key leadership traits given by textbooks are extraversion, conscientiousness,