How to Write a Cause and Effect Essay in Leadership Studies

Your assignment is to write a cause and effect essay in leadership studies and you have no idea of how to get started? Cause and effect essays are common assignments for college students in many different subjects and their purpose is to analyze your argue about casual relationships between different events, phenomena or issues. Such assignments are deeply speculative and tentative and require strong analytical and critical thinking skills because you need to analyze how different issues or sequences of events interact with each other over time. It’s typically more difficult than just describing a process or reporting events in a chronological order.

In this easy step-by-step guide, we discuss all aspects of writing an impressive cause and effect essay in leadership studies. Keep reading to find detailed instructions for every stage of the writing process from selecting an interesting topic to editing and proofreading your paper. And if you face problems with completing other type of academic papers, check out other full guides to all writing assignments out there at our website!

What Is a Cause and Effect Essay in Leadership Studies?

Leadership studies is a complex subject that focuses on studying a phenomenon of leadership in different human groups. It studies the relationships between leaders and their followers. The goal of cause and effect papers in leadership studies is to explore and analyze the causes and/or effects of specific leadership skills and processes in a wide variety of social contexts. When working on such projects, you be able to gain insights about how to use power, influence, and authority to manage different groups and collaborate with people who have diverse backgrounds.
Typically, you need to be objective and dispassionate in your essays although in more complex projects, you may be required not just to explain something but to speculate or even to argue about the interpretation. You may write an essay primarily about causes of something, primarily about effects or explain both causes and effects.

There are 2 ways to structure a cause and effect essay in leadership studies and both of them have their advantages.

• You may use the block structure and first list all causes and then discuss all effects. This type of structure is good for shorter papers and is clearer.
• If you use the chain structure, you need to discuss each effect immediately after each cause. This type of structure shows relationships between each cause and effect and is better for longer essays.

Choosing an Interesting Topic for a Cause and Effect Essay

Choose a topic you are interested in and of course, it must be relevant to your course. When writing about causes and effects, it’s important to choose a narrow topic, especially if you are assigned to write a short, concise essay. You are unlikely to analyze a broad topic in a limited word count and it would be quite reasonable to address only the main causes and effects if you are writing about a complex issue. Have no idea of what to write about? Here is a short list of good cause and effect essay topics in leadership studies. Feel free to pick any of them for writing your own essay.

• Why Is Emotional Intelligence Crucial for Successful Leadership?
• Why Is Diversity at Workplace Vital to Organizational Success?
• Factors That Influence Leadership Effectiveness;
• Links between Conflict Management Styles and Organizational Effectiveness;
• Role of Effective Communication in Team Building;
• Why Is the Ability to Negotiate Important for Leaders?
• Why Is Active Listening Important in Business Environment and How Can it Improve Your Leadership?
• Impact of Consensus Decision Making on the Success of an Organization;
• Impact of Authentic Leadership on Organizational Commitment;
• Why Is It Important to Communicate Your Corporate Vision to Your Team?
• Causes of Gender Differences in Leadership and Their impact on Corporate Strategies;
• The Role of Leaders in Shaping Organizational Culture;
• Why Is Goal Setting Important for a Leadership Career?
• Explain Why Empathy is the Standout Leadership Skill;
• Impact of Big Data Analytics on Leadership Development

Planning a Cause and Effect Essay in Leadership Studies

The purpose of writing an essay is to present a coherent, reasoned argument to a specific essay question. You have to provide a focused and progressive response and that’s why you need an effective structure that helps deliver a clear argument to your readers. You need to plan your essay and think about the best ways to organize your ideas. The organization of your essay must reflect the logic of your analysis. But it’s not always easy to do because a single effect often can have several causes and one cause can lead to several effects.

So first you need to analyze your essay questions to get a clear idea of what you need to write about. Then do preliminary research to create a working thesis or a research question and brainstorm ideas for further investigation. Read a lot of relevant authoritative sources and make notes of the information that is relevant to your essay title. Make sure that you keep track of all your sources from where you have obtained the information.

Now revise your thesis statement and make sure it is strong and highly specific. It should explain the causes and/or effects you will explore in your paper. For example, your thesis statement for an essay about the impact of emotional intelligence on the leadership success may look like this one:

Emotional intelligence is an important leadership skill that plays the key role in determining successful leaders that can effectively manage, lead, motivate, inspire, and influence others.

Identify the key points that will help you support your thesis and determine which of them are causes and which of them are effects. After that you can create an outline of your cause and effect essay in leadership studies. Decide on a logical order of the key points and think about transitions between them to ensure that your argument is logical.

Writing Cause and Effect Essay in Leadership Studies

The structure of your essay must include an engaging introduction where you present your topic, the main body where you develop an argument, and a convincing conclusion that wraps everything up.

Introduction

The purpose of introduction is to give your audience a clear idea of what you’ll cover in your essay. You need to present a broad overview of your topic and your thesis and convince your readers that your essay is worth reading. Here are some tips on how to make your introduction engaging.

• Use ‘general to specific’ structure. That means you should introduce a topic in a general sense to provide a context and then narrow it down to presenting your specific position and your argument.
• Provide some background information to help your readers understand why a specific problem is worth writing about and why they should care about it. Be concise and include only relevant information.
• You may introduce some key terms and provide their definitions.
• Introduce your thesis statement and tell your audience the main idea of your paper. Make sure that your thesis directly answers the essay question.
• Briefly outline the most important points you are going to make to support your thesis. In this way, you’ll help your readers understand the structure of your essay.
• Be creative about the structure of your introduction and try to avoid clichés!
• It’s not obligatory to write your introduction first. You may do it after you finish at least some of the body paragraphs or even all of them.

Main Body

In the body of your essay, you may discuss causes and effects, effects and their solutions or causes and their solutions. But you should make sure that each paragraph discusses only one idea which means you shouldn’t discuss a cause and its effect in one paragraph if you decide to use the chain structure. You should split your argument into 2 separate paragraphs. Besides, every paragraph should refer back to the main idea of your paper.

You should think of your body paragraphs as of mini essays and use the following structure for all of them.

• Begin every paragraph with a topic sentence that outlines the main idea and states the purpose of the paragraph.
• Include several supporting sentences that explain the main idea. You should include supporting sentences that clarify difficult terms in the topic sentence and illustrate the main idea with relevant facts, examples, and quotes. Besides, you should include comments that analyze your evidence and explain how it relates to the main idea of the paragraph. Make sure that each subsequent sentence reinforces your topic sentence.
• End every paragraph with a concluding sentence that refers back to the topic sentence, summarizes the ideas and leads to the next paragraph.

Use specific phrases (signal words) which indicate that the information in the paragraph is organized as cause and effect, for example, due to, since, as a result, because, so, consequently, therefore, then, thus, owing to, as a consequence, is caused by, leads to, for this reason, so that. Besides, you should make sure that all your body paragraphs are placed in a logical and consistent order.

Conclusion

A conclusion gives you the last chance to impress your readers so it’s important to make it as convincing and memorable as possible. You should help your readers understand why all your analysis should matter to them. Here are some recommendations about the structure of a powerful conclusion.

• You concluding paragraph should provide a short summary of what you have already said and emphasize the significance of your topic.
• You may restate your thesis statement using different words and phrases.
• You can summarize all the points (your causes and/or effects) but you shouldn’t include any new information. Don’t just repeat things that were in your essay but show your audience how your points and the evidence you used fit together.
• You may also want to include your opinion on the topic.
• You may provide suggestions for further study or propose a solution to a problem.
• If the purpose of your cause and effect essay was to convince your audience to agree with your point of view, you may also include some call to action that may solve as a solution to the problems they you have discussed in your piece of writing.

Edit and Proofread Your Cause and Effect Essay in Leadership Studies

Editing and proofreading are important steps of the writing process that have a great impact of the success of your essay and your grade so you should never forget to give your paper a second look. When you finish writing essay, put it aside for a couple of days and then revise and edit it to improve the content, logical flow, sentence structure, style, and word choice. In this way, you’ll avoid the writers’ blindness and will be able to look at your paper from a new perspective and notice more weaknesses and mistakes. First you should read the entire essay aloud in a way you read stories and find sentences and paragraphs that are not clear or sound awkward. You should mark these spots and fix them when you finish reading. You may need to revise and edit your essay several times until you are satisfied with the content and style. Besides, you need to check your in-text citations and make sure that are formatted properly and consistently.

When proofreading your essay, you’d better work with a printed copy because it’s easier to catch error on paper than on a computer screen. You can also read your essay backwards paragraph after paragraph or sentence after sentence – you are much likely to notice mistakes when you are not distracted by the content. At this stage, you need to fix all minor spelling, grammar, and punctuation mistakes and typos.

As you see, the process of writing a convincing cause and effect essay in leadership studies may be rather time-consuming and requires a lot of work. Still, you can successfully cope with this challenging project if you follow our instructions and use our easy tips.