What are the biggest leadership challenges?

There are broadly two major categories on which leadership faces challenges. They are:

• Trustworthiness
• Attribution

Trust is merely a psychological contract that influences a person (a follower in this situation) to make themselves vulnerable to another on the premise of having strong positive expectations from another person (in this case, a leader). Trust is one of the most important aspects associated with leadership and trust propensity defines how likely any follower is to trust a leader. This premise of trust can be formed on the basis of three characteristics:

• Integrity, the tendency to act with honesty and truthfulness
• Benevolence, the tendency of a person to act in the best interests of others (or everyone) even when they aren’t in alignment with the leader’s own interests
• Ability, the interpersonal and technical knowledge and skills of the leader

Leadership can take a high toll when employees find that this psychological contract with their leader is broken in terms of integrity or benevolence or ability or all of these. On the other hand, a strongly established trust can encourage employees to take risks, be more productive and effective and facilitate information sharing.

A Longitudinal Study published in the Academy of Management Journal suggested that the performance of organisations led to a perceived notion of charisma and leadership in the leaders. This sums up in short the role of attribution in the challenges of a leader.