Leadership Styles

As the new supervisor of the clerical support assistant for the department I feel it is my responsibility to research and explore different leadership styles. I have had no formal training, and will explore the major leadership theories and models. I will develop a pro and con list involving these theories and models, so I may evaluate them to incorporate these theories and models into my own personal style.

Leadership Style
Pro's / Con's

Authoritarian
PRO: Employees are well motivated to get the job done
CON: Doesn't Get advice from other People

Participative
PRO: Includes Employees in Decision marking process
Employee's will respect you
Allows employees to be a part of the team
CON: Can be time consuming to get decisions made

Delegative PRO: Free up time for leaders to do other things
Employee make the decisions, leader is responsible

Fiedler's Contingency
Theory of Leadership PRO: Change style for current situation
Fits with your own personal characteristics
CON: Using this style you may not always be consistent

Path-Goal Theory PRO: Helps achieve group and organizational goals
Raise subordinates beliefs about their ability
to achieve their work
CON: Goal Oriented, tasks must be goal oriented.
REFERENCES TO TABLE ABOVE
1 (Big Dog, 2000)
2 (George & Jones, 2005, pg 381, 385)

Leadership Theories / Models and my own personal style
Authoritarian or autocratic (Big Dog, 2000) leadership style is the type of style that is a dictatorship. In this type of leadership style you will not get input from your employee's. I feel this is the con due to the fact, getting input from an employee shows the employee you value your opinion and can be used a technique to motivate.

Participative or democratic (Big Dog, 2000) leadership style is the type of style where as everyone has an input on every situation. Although this is a good motivation tool, not every task or goal is going to require an employee's input. In addition, companies such as ours, Superior Sales Corporation, has a given set of tasks and objectives set down by top management whereas employee's input would not be necessary.

Delegative or free reign (Big Dog, 2000) leadership style is the type of style where as the employees make all the decisions and the leaders take full responsible for these decisions. Given the fact we are the supervisor of one clerical support assistant for the department, Delegative would not apply to this situation.

Fiedler's Contingency Theory of Leadership is the theory that the leader's effectiveness is determined by both the personal characteristics of leaders and by the situations in which leaders fine themselves. (George & Jones, 2005, pg 381) Fiedler has identified two leadership styles, relationship oriented and task-oriented styles. (George & Jones, 2005, pg 381) The task oriented styles wants their employee's to accomplish all of their assigned tasks. You then push the employee to make sure their tasks are completed. The relationship oriented style first priority is to make sure you have a good working relationship with the employee. In addition Fiedler proposed that situations vary, and that leaders can not be taught to be relationship or task oriented. (George & Jones, 2005, pg 385)

Path-Goal Theory is a theory that describes how leaders can motivate their followers to achieve group and organizational goals and the kinds of behaviors leaders can engage in to motivate followers. (George & Jones, 2005, pg 385) Using this theory effective leaders make sure they have control over the outcomes of their subordinates. (George & Jones, 2005, Table 12.3) Once a subordinate has achieved their work goals, this type of leadership style rewards those employees for performing at a high level.

After looking at the major theories and models of leadership, I have concluded that in our current situation of being a supervisor of the clerical assistant for the department, that the best suited leadership theory for my own personal style would be the Path-Goal Theory. The reason for this is the clerical assistant would have to perform tasks for many department supervisors and mangers, the Path-Goal Theory would help motivate the clerical assistant to perform his/her tasks.

References

Big Dog's Leadership Page - Leadership Styles, Created May 11, 1997. Last update - February 6, 2000, retrieved on September 7, 2005 from http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/leader/leadstl.html -Written by Don Clark, author name retrieved from http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/about/about.html

George, J.M. & Jones, G.R. (2005). Understanding & Managing Organization Behavior - A Custom Edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Custom Publishing.