Leadership and management differ in that management is designed to promote stability or to make the organisation run smoothly, while the role of leadership is to promote adaptive change. One can think of a leadership function corresponding to each of the management functions (planning, organising, leading and controlling) but carried out very differently. One of the essential features of this difference is that leaders can influence others to perform beyond the actions dictated by formal authority.

Leadership can be seen as formal (where people are appointed or elected to positions of formal authority within organisations) and informal (where people become influential by virtue of special skills and attributes that meet the needs and resources of others).

Leadership literature reveals a range of approaches to understanding leadership, with two categories demarcated. These are traditional and new leadership. Traditional leadership approaches include:

· Trait and behaviour approaches that give leadership a central role in performance and human resource maintenance outputs

· Situational contingency approaches that combine leadership with situational contingencies to predict outputs

· The leadership substitutes perspective, which argues that situational contingencies sometimes replace leadership in causing outputs.