Effective leadership : a study of white collar workers union leaders in role perspective

Leadership is a decisive force for achivement of societal or organizational goals. This recogni tion has stimulated much research for identify ing the factors that result in leadership effective ness. However, inspite of voluminous research, there is relatively little which deals specifically with leadership problems in labour relations. The present research conclude that meticulous methodological frameworks, developed so far, for analysis of leadership seem quite remot for the analysis of leadership in an organization having fluid situation like that of labour or workers union. The present research successfully fills this gap by focusing on the leaders of white collar workers' unions, a much neglected area of research in Indian sociology. This study pro vides an unique methodological framework for analysis of leadership in almost every type of organizations or situations. The given methodo logical framework is based on role perspection. This perspective identifies the effective pattern of leadership by the micro behaviour analaysis of the leadership goals, societal expectations and actual performance of the leaders. It iden tifies the factors related with leadership effec tiveness in terms of the subjective characteristics of the leaders and the objective factors related to their unions and work-establishments.

As a byproduct of the study, we get a clear picture of the leadership characteristics, the internal situation and the functioning of the white collar workers unions in India. The au thor also examine the theories of unionism and concludes that in white collar organizations, at the grass root level of unionism, inspite of the varying ideologies, the overall leadership goal is the establishment of a healthy employer employee relationship.