Political Science Essays on Leadership Styles
Introduction
Leadership styles are sets of behaviors employed by leaders to influence the behaviors of their followers. Leadership directly impacts an organization and its achievement. Leaders influence employee determination, change acceptance, standards, and culture. Good leaders influence their followers to attain utmost benefits from institutional resources and people. The manner in which a leader makes decisions, assigns responsibilities, and relates with employees affect the whole organization (Fernandez 176).
How one’s Leadership Style affect the Morale and Behavior of the Followers
Autocratic leaders have the authority and take all decisions. They can harm an organization because they force their followers to implement policies and services in a restricted way according to a subjective opinion of what success is believed to be. In addition, they do not value commitment, creativity, and innovation. The majority of the autocratic leaders’ followers bide their time to wait for probable failure of their leaders and their removal. Autocratic leaders who do not seek ideas from their followers isolate them and reduce their feeling of participation. When the followers feel estranged, their morale and productivity are reduced. It is worth mentioning that autocratic leaders are charismatic and have a vision and personality that encourage followers to implement the vision. Therefore, they enhance creativity and innovation and are motivational (Skakon et al. 108).
Bureaucratic leaders establish and depend on policy to achieve organizational objectives. Policies determine implementation, approach, goals, and outcomes. They depend on established policies to persuade their followers hence policy commands direction. These types of leaders focus on procedures and processes rather than individuals. They do not motivate and develop individuals since policies do not focus on motivating and encouraging commitment among individuals. These leaders do not boost the morale of followers because policies are given more priority than people. Established and blindly implemented policies discourage employees and aggravate anticipated results. In addition, bureaucratic leadership style does not encourage and have a small impact on people’s development. The leaders slow communication by ensuring that every aspect of a message and method of delivery adheres to strict organizational guidelines. This process can impede communication and prevent workers from receiving instruction and information they need to perform their duties. These types of leaders do not motivate the followers because of their failure to seek for their opinions and misrepresent information to fit their needs. Incorrect and ineffectual information is disseminated in an organization, which demoralizes individuals (Fernandez 178).
Democratic leadership encourages the involvement of employees in decision- making and determining the goal of an organization. Democratic leaders accept the followers’ input and make use of relevant information to improve the process of work. They also allow employee participation and make them feel part of the organization’s achievement. Leaders who engage employees in an organization’s operations build morale and enhance productivity. Democratic leaders stress on equal status and encourage friendship and good relations in an organization. They enable individuals to feel valued when their views are solicited.
Transformational leaders aim at changing their followers. Therefore, they project maintainable, self-replicating leadership. They do not utilize the force of character and negotiation to convince their followers but believe in using wisdom, skills, and vision to transform individuals in a manner that makes them strong followers. Transformational leaders increase the morale of their followers by giving them an opportunity to change, transform, and become contributors. This leadership style promotes creative problem solving and client loyalty. Leaders who establish clear objectives increase employee productivity. Transformational leaders are determined to encourage the workforce to success. They establish precise employee objectives and provide them all the resources they require to achieve their objectives. A leadership style that stresses on empowerment can develop clear goals. Empowered workers make their own decisions under the guidance of strict organizational goals. Transformational leadership style is characterized by ideal influence, as the leaders serve as a role model and motivate others. They also offer meaning and challenge to subordinates’ roles and inspire them to be creative and handle challenges in new ways. They focus on subordinates’ personal needs and guide them (Skakon et al. 109).
Transactional leaders boost the morale of their followers by rewarding them in the form of a good performance appraisal, a promotion, new responsibilities, or preferred change in duties. They are charismatic leaders who are effective and motivate their followers by creating deals that motivate them thus benefiting an organization. The leaders realize their followers’ agreement on what is supposed to be done in exchange for a promised reward. They also exercise management-by-exemption through observing deviations from standards and making an effort to correct them. Furthermore, they highlight errors after they have happened (Brahim et al. 8).
Situational leadership is based on the view that good leaders always adapt by assuming different approaches for different contexts. The leaders know the needs of an organization and individual incentive. This style permits skilled leaders to select the desired leadership iteration. The ability of the leaders to experiment and create different styles for several contexts to come up with good results boosts the morale of the followers. The leaders modify their leadership style according to employees’ needs for structure and socio-emotional support (Skakon et al. 109).
When leaders conduct themselves in a manner that clearly reflects anticipated organizational culture, they view those following them to be in balance, forming conditions where they are not disturbed by small issues that can make good days become bad. When the followers are not pleased with the behavior of their leaders and regard their working environment to be unfriendly and not supportive and collaborative, irrelevant disturbances can reduce their morale and increase their probability of deserting decisions. Young leaders who have no experience and proper training have a challenge of increasing employee morale. Leaders can show undesirable social messages if they do not understand how their behavior affect culture. They need to project positive attitudes since behavior that is viewed negatively can change the mood of the followers from optimistic to destructive. Furthermore, leaders should believe in the abilities and organizational devotion of their followers to increase their morale (Skakon et al. 109).
When leaders believe that employees are good individuals, they start the process of establishing an accommodating, cooperative, and friendly environment. However, most leaders think that employees should adjust to cultural expectations. Employees cannot understand organizational expectations if leaders do not exemplify organizational culture in a manner that makes them happy.
Successful task-oriented leaders are vital in contributing to their members’ competency through developing goals, assigning duties, and implementing authorizations. Leaders’ task-oriented behavior has a positive influence on the performance of the followers. They develop a structure for their followers, clarify responsibilities, enlighten on what to be done and why, establish well-defined forms of organizational communication channels, and decide ways of accomplishing duties (Fernandez 181). However, followers may view task-oriented leaders as detached, autocratic and punitive, leading to lower levels of their satisfaction.
Relations-oriented behavior promotes a balanced and emotionally supportive environment that enhances higher degrees of contentment and enthusiasm. Supportive behaviors like displaying trust, confidence and appreciation, recognizing followers’ efforts and offering feedback, and consulting and engaging them in decision making enhance their contentment with their leader and their job. Relations-oriented leadership impacts the performance positively by forming open channels of communication, increasing personal responsibility among subordinates, and contributing to their devotion to the leader and the organization. Subordinates who consider their leaders effective and emotionally supportive have higher chances of rating them well.
Development–oriented or change-oriented behavior impacts organizational outcomes through several underlying ways. Leaders who involve in development-oriented behavior increase performance by ensuring that their organizations are more adaptive and reactive to the external environment. They also identify the most promising strategic initiatives for their organization as well as promote invention and creativeness among subordinates (Fernandez 181).
Toxic leaders show behavior that is discouraging, degrading, seducing, sidelining, threatening, and demoralizing. They also vitiate the environment of their followers (Mehta et al. 4). Regarding negative leadership behaviors, offensive leaders lead to increased turnover and psychological distress. They are inversely associated with job and life contentment. Employees that work under leaders who annoy and humiliate them and assault their self-esteem are likely to have low self-efficacy and lose assurance to perform good work that results in low job satisfaction and decline in performance and morale (Mehta et al. 5).
Conclusion
Leadership style refers to the manner in which leaders attain their goals. It can have a deep impact on an organization and its workers and define an organization’s effectiveness. Individuals can select and develop leadership styles and abilities by evaluating their own tendencies and skills, comprehending organizational needs, believing in themselves, and being ready for a change.
Works Cited
Brahim, Ali Bousbia, Ognjen Ridic, and Tomislav Jukic. “The Effect of Transactional Leadership on Employees Performance-Case Study of 5 Algerian Banking Institutions.” Economic Review: Journal of Economics and Business 13.2 (2015): 7-20.
Fernandez, Sergio. “Examining the effects of leadership behavior on employee perceptions of performance and job satisfaction.” Public Performance & Management Review 32.2 (2008): 175-205.
Mehta, Sunita, and Girish Chandra Maheshwari. “Consequence of Toxic leadership on Employee Job Satisfaction and Organizational Commitment.” Journal of Contemporary Management Research 8.2 (2013).
Skakon, Janne, et al. “Are leaders’ well-being, behaviours and style associated with the affective well-being of their employees? A systematic review of three decades of research.” Work & Stress 24.2 (2010): 107-139.