Aidan Balderas
Staff Writer
Issam A. Ghazzawi, professor of management, spoke about the importance of leadership and how it can falter at the faculty lecture on Tuesday via Zoom before a virtual audience of 67 people.
In the presentation introduced by Matthew Witt, professor of public administration, Ghazzawi discussed dominant leaders and leadership tendencies and practices.
Ghazzawi told the audience about how leadership is built and how it can falter from an organizational standpoint, especially within a business run by CEOs.
“An organization is as great as its leader,” Ghazzawi said. “There still exists a dark side of leadership that exemplifies unethical, yet destructive and toxic leadership that abuses others.”
The subject of leadership holds a prominent place in the management literature, he said, adding that much of the research on the topic suggested that people’s performance and commitment are positively influenced by organization’s leadership.
Ghazzawi expanded, discussing the traits one must have to be a successful and respected leader.
“Leadership traits are considered to be enduring attributes that people are born with and that remain stable over time,” he said.
He added these traits include intelligence, dominance, self-confidence, tolerance of stress, and emotional maturity.
Effective leaders are reliable and consistent.
“Effective leadership is regarded as the capacity to affect, infect, and infest followers,” Ghazzawi said, adding that good leaders inspire, they don’t manipulate.
Toward the end of the presentation, Ghazzawi noted that the wrong leaders in the wrong place can cause the fall of a nation.
Failed leadership is associated with negative, critical, distrustful, selfish and hostile behavior, Ghazzawi said, adding that bad leaders take credit for others’ work.
“We’ve all been in toxic organizations before,” said Al Clark, professor of humanities, who attended the Zoom talk. “It’s a very intriguing field that Dr. Ghazzawi is working in.”
“It taught me what to do and what not to do,” said Litzy Silva, junior criminology major.
Aidan Balderas can be reached at aidan.balderas@laverne.edu.
Aidan Balderas, a freshman journalism major, is a staff writer for the Campus Times.
Drake Ingram, a junior criminology major and photography minor, is a staff photographer for the Campus Times.
