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Abstract
The ability of leaders to have a profound and extra-ordinary effect on their followers has been termed as a characteristic of their charisma. Research has also focused on the situational characteristics of leadership and attempted to study whether there are conceptual conflicts between the practices of leadership and management.
Leadership is associated with deeper levels of meaning that is absent from much of leadership theory and research. When leadership is combined with a desire to serve, then the characteristic of servant leadership emerges which attempts to build high quality dyadic relationships of trust. One of the important contributions of leadership is also to engage with the temporal dynamics of the team in order to ensure positive contributions to performance.
Leadership research thus seems to have focused on the characteristics of the leader, its implications for management, levels of meaning, quality of dyadic relationships and team performance. This indicates an emphasis on the personality of the leader and the functional benefits derived from the leader. Yet as the emphasis on the meanings involved in the phenomena of leadership indicates, the practice of leadership is often a socially shared space rather than a personality driven space, and while considering meanings, there may be a great advantage obtained from studying the aesthetics emerging from the practice of leadership.