The ability to take initiative in planning, organizing, and managing group activities, projects, and games.

In any group of children or adults, there are those who step forward to organize people and events to achieve a specific result. In organized activities, leaders can be designated and, in informal contexts, such as children's play groups, they may emerge naturally. What makes certain people into leaders is open to debate. Thus Luella Cole and Irma Nelson Hall have written that leadership "seems to consist of a cluster of traits, a few inborn but most of them acquired or at least developed by contact with the environment." Leaders have their own leadership style, and that style may not transfer from one situation to another.

Psychologists have also defined leadership as a mentality, as opposed to aptitude, the assumption being that mentalities can be acquired. For example, as John E. Anderson has...