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Youth Leadership In Sports
Jonathon Hardcastle
Leadership has been called the most studied and least understood
topic of any in the social sciences. Leadership is the process
of providing direction, energizing others, and obtaining their
voluntary commitment to the leader's vision. A leader creates
a vision and goals and influences others to share that vision
and work toward the goals. Leaders are thus concerned with
bridging about change and motivating others to support that
vision to change. As scholars state, "management involves
coping with complexity, while leadership is about coping with
change."
Leaders can be found at all levels of a sports organization,
but not all immediately stand out from the crowd. Different
situations, different cultures, different organizations, at
different moments in their life, call for different characteristics
and require different skills in a leader. A young person may
be terrific at exercising leadership in his/her volleyball
team, yet be awful in exercising leadership in another environment.
This happens all the time. Some terrific young sports leaders
exercise no leadership in their school projects or in other
typed of clubs they may belong at the same time, not just
because they choose not to, but also because they do not know
how. Those other settings have different set of norms, different
authority structures and different sets of adaptive challenges
that the kid may be unfamiliar with.
On the other hand, power is the ability to influence the behavior
of others. Regardless of their age, leaders exercise power
and effective leaders know how to use it wisely. The types
of power used by a young leader reveal a great deal about
why others follow that child. One of the most useful frameworks
for understanding the power of leaders was developed by John
French and Bertram Raven. They identified five types of power:
legitimate, reward, coercive, referent and expert power.
But apart from the different forms of power that leaders can
use, there are several different characteristics that describe
how effective young leaders influence others. These characteristics
have been put into four categories of models: traits, behavioral,
contingency and transformational. There is no single or simple
answer to which style of leadership works best. Fifty years
ago, trait models of leadership were popular. Gradually, as
evidence accumulated, traits models were replaced-first by
behavioral models and then by contingency models. Currently,
the transformational model has many supporters, reflecting
efforts of many leaders to transform outdated forms of organizations
into more competitive ones. Traits models are based on the
assumption that certain physical, social, and personal characteristics
are inherent in leaders. According to this view, the presence
or absence of these characteristics distinguishes leaders
from non-leaders. Some of the key traits are physical, social
background and personality traits. There is some common sense
supporting the notion that effective leaders, young or older,
have certain traits. However research hasn't proved that traits
consistently separate potential leaders from non-leaders.
For example, the physical characteristics of a young baseball
athlete don't necessarily correlate with his ability to excise
successful leadership later in his life; they relate only
to perceived leadership ability.
Summing up, as today's world pace speeds up, the leadership
styles applied during the previous century, or even twenty
years ago, differ substantially from the ones needed to be
applied today or in 2020. To illustrate this, consider the
young members of a school baseball team who if unwilling and
unable to perform, the school coach will then definitely have
to follow the autocratic leadership style. As long, though,
as the coach applies appropriate motivation and training techniques,
the young subordinates gradually become willing and able.
Hence the situation is changing. This denotes that the leadership
should also evolve from the autocratic towards the democratic
style. In a few words the leadership style should "comply"
with the evolution of the outstanding situation. As the example
illustrates, sports organizations, especially those that involve
children, must confront the future and learn from past practices
by continuously adapting to the new instruction programs that
evolve.
Jonathon Hardcastle writes articles on many topics
including Kids
And Teens, and Family.
Article Source: http://www.upublish.info
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