Option #2: Analysis of Leadership Study Evolution and Biographic Leadership

There are three parts to this week’s Critical Thinking Assignment paper.

Part I:

An important concept for this week’s study is there are any number of leadership approaches, each touted to be a primary influence of organizational success. Each person builds perceptions about leadership based on experiences, education, training, and personal biases. Page III of this week’s lecture provides insight into an exercise that may be useful for individuals to understand their own leadership definitions: constructing a biographical leadership explanation. Western (2013) [required reading] offered a personal example of a leadership explanation through the author’s lens; Western also describes the exercise as “locating oneself.”

Begin this Critical Thinking Assignment by composing your personal biographic leadership explanation. You may use Western’s format or another that is supported by the literature.

Place the biographical leadership explanation in Appendix A of the paper.

Part II:

Create an historical overview of leadership evolution by constructing a time-line showing how leadership study has changed over time. The time-line should span three decades and a minimum of three (3) research phases extracted from different scholarly sources should be applied across the time-line.

Place the time-line and definition overview in Appendix B of the paper.

Part III:

Develop an analytic essay* exploring how your leadership explanation was informed by time and by leadership study evolution. That is, decompose and extract elements from your biographical explanation and determine if and where the elements might be related to the time-line and approaches.

Within the analytic paper, reference Appendices A and B.

Include a conclusion based on findings and insights related to what influenced your personal leadership assumptions and experiences.

Requirements:

• Support your response with research from at least four scholarly sources and, in addition, you may use the required course readings.
• Your paper should be three to four pages in length, not counting the required title and reference pages and appendices.
• Your paper must be formatted according to the CSU-Global Guide to Writing and APA. (Links to an external site.)
• Review the grading rubric below to understand how you will be graded on this assignment. Reach out to your instructor if you have questions about the assignment.