According to Joanne Ciulla, "Leadership is not a person or a position. It is a complex moral relationship between people, based on trust, obligation, commitment, emotion, and a shared vision of the good." (1998, p. 30) Based on this opinion, people will think of many well-known leaders in this world, for example, Abraham Lincoln, who was the 16th President of United States of America, emancipated slavery in U.S., and was a great leader who could lead people, especially rival groups, to achieve common goals, Deng Xiaoping, who was the Chinese President and significantly reformed politics, society, and an economy in China, and Adolf Hitler, who was the leader of the Nazi Party and brought people to catastrophe in World War II. Obviously, the leaders in these examples succeeded in building a complex moral relationship between their people, although there are two opposite results; in other words, Lincoln elevated human equality and living quality; meanwhile, Hitler destroyed human life. Furthermore, if we determine Ralph’s leadership in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies by this definition, Ralph does definitely not possess leadership. Even though he has been voted to be the leader of the children because of his charisma and possessing the conch, he fails to build a complex moral relationship between his colleagues. The strong evidence that shows his lack of leadership is the group meeting held by Jack in order to remove Ralph from the chief of group shown in “Gift for the Darkness” and “A View to a Death” in Lord of the Flies. After Jack and Ralph have come back from hunting the beast, Jack calls the meeting and requests the children to vote to remove Ralph from being the chief of the children. Although the children do not immediately respond to Jack’s challenge at that time and Jack has to leave the group, almost all of the children finally decide to be on Jack’s team and Ralph’s group decreases to only four people including himself. From the character in the novel to people in the real world, unfortunately, people generally love to have a leader who is charismatic, and they understand that this is the most important trait of leadership; in fact, we find a lot of examples that show charismatic leaders cannot lead countries or groups to achieve targets. Joseph Estrada, who was a film actor and became the 13thPresident of the Philippines during 1998 – 2001, is a famous example of a charismatic leader who leads the country to face many social and economic problems, and he is finally sentenced to jail after being found guilty of corruption.
Reference
Ciulla J. (1998) What is Leadership? Centre for Leadership Studies.University of Exeter.
Sup,
ReplyDeleteThank you for posting your excellent paragraph on leadership. It's a thoughtful and constructive piece of work that deserves a wider audience.
If anyone else would like to post some of their work for the historical record, please feel welcome.
Although this blog does not have the largest audience in the world, it might be surprisingly larger than you had realised. I just checked the statistics, and for the week Dec. 7 - 14, there were 80 views from Thailand, but 206 from the US, and another 150 from the rest of the world, which is about normal. And that's about normal - over the past month, there have been 1,136 views from the US. I don't know who all those US and European viewers are, but it's nice to know that they're there.
I will cancel the automatic email advices on Sunday, but I won't cancel your membership of the blog and posting permissions until the start of next term, when it will be handed over to my next AEP class.