Personal Reflection on Different Leadership Styles Research Paper

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Perceived Leadership Integrity

Leadership Style

My leadership style can be best described as servant leadership. This approach is based on the idea that the leader exists to bring out the best in the people who are being led. Ultimately, I feel that as a leader I fit in a role where I am seeking to optimize the strategies and plans related to the organization as a whole, and that the best way for me to do so is to ensure that the people under my charge are equipped to perform at their highest level (Greenleaf, 2016). One leader alone cannot bring about the organizational results that are desired; only the entire organization can do that. Therefore, the role of the leader is to facilitate each and every member of the organization to operate at his or her highest possible level, without constraints, and that they may be encouraged to do so.

I volunteer for an organization where I have taken on a leadership role, largely as the result of being one of the first people to dedicate time to the organization. As my role has evolved over the past few years, I find that empowerment of others is the best way to achieve the organizational results. This is something that I have learned over time. For the most part, the people who might be considered one level down from myself are highly competent, dedicated people. If given the opportunity and resources, they will excel. The theory basically trickles down from there -- at each level, if people are empowered to be at their best, they will do so. So my experience is that by providing the knowledge and resources people need to excel, they will usually do so, and this is the best thing that the leader can do for the organization, because hundreds of people with informal power are far more powerful than one individual who happens to have been bestowed with formal power.

Leadership Style Aspirations

There are several other leadership styles that we learned about in class, and there are most definitely elements of those styles that I would like to adopt, to varying degrees. If we look at Lewin's leadership styles, I clearly fit within the confines of the democratic leader, and that is not something I would want to change. But I would like to add a greater transformational element to my leadership. I am actually at this point an accomplished transactional leader. I can empower people to perform routine tasks to a high level of confidence simply by giving them the background knowledge and tools, and allowing them leeway in how they wish to interpret the organizational vision.

However, I would like to add a transformational element to this. Transformational leaders "inspire their team members because they expect the best from everyone," which already fits my philosophy (MindTools, 2016) but transformational leaders also wish to see their team move from one state to another. The transformational leader has an element of vision that can be quite powerful, because that vision allows for the organization to move from one state to another, under the guidance of a strong leader who can convey that vision and the steps that will take the organization from its present state to its envisioned state.

There are a few reason why I like this approach. First, it is compatible with the way I already approach leadership. For the most part, my leadership approach fits within the democratic school (Cherry, 2016), but the transactional-transitional line is about organizational outcomes, not the way someone leads. Any leadership style can, in theory, be either transactional or transformational, depending on what the organization needs. In my case, I excel at transactional leadership, which works well for most situations, but there are times when I feel that it would be beneficial to empower people not just to perform their jobs well, but to transform an organization into some new great vision. This might be an element my ego sliding into my thinking about leadership style, but so be it. Ultimately, I would like to have that power to take an organization or unit forward in some new way, while simultaneously doing it through the empowerment of the people within the organization. I do not see these two styles as mutually exclusive, and that is one of the reasons this is something I want.

I also have examined the transformational leadership concept as something that I would like to incorporate because I feel that all leadership, ultimately, is situational in nature.

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Stone (2004) argued that transformational leadership is contrary to servant leadership in terms of where the leader's focus lies, but I do not subscribe to this logic. The leader is always an intermediary between the organization and the followers; those bodies have a mutually beneficial relationship, and the leader ensures that the benefit is maximized. The leader, therefore, can retain a servant focus, while pursuing organizational objectives. The pursuit of follower and organizational objectives is not mutually exclusive. It all depends on the situation. The situational aspect of leadership means that the most effective leaders are those who can recognize the differences between situations and adjust their styles -- however subtlety -- accordingly. It is actually unlikely that a leader would be able to completely adopt a whole new leadership style, but adding to one's skillset can only make one a more effective leader when the time comes to recognizing a unique situation and make adjustments to take advantage of that.

Styles I Reject

There are many different approaches to leadership. Ultimately, the fit between the leadership style has to be both with the leader and with the organization. There have been arguments posited that fit matters -- one leadership style does not rule all, and that organizational characteristics matter (Faleye, 2007). Different organizations function better with different leadership styles. But leaders are also bound by who they are, and by the ways in which they prefer to interact with their organizations.

The first style that I would not wish to adopt is the autocratic leadership style. This leadership style is anathema to me, being pretty much the antipode to the servant leadership style. The autocratic style is rooted in the idea that the leader knows best, and thus should control everything. Clearly, I do not subscribe to this approach. I see it as counterproductive, and as something that turns good people off from an organization. If you want to get the best from people, you need them to pursue their best. You simply cannot achieve it by telling them what their ceiling is, so for that reason the autocratic leadership style is one that I patently reject.

The second leadership style that I reject is the laissez-faire leadership style. Lewin characterized this leadership style as being one where the leader essentially does little -- just lets the people do their work with minimal guidance or oversight (ChangingMinds.org, 2016). One way to think about this is that it is compatible with servant leadership in that the followers have free reign to do what they need to. However, this is not really something I can believe in, for a couple of reasons. First, it means that I as leader am not really doing much. If I am not making a positive contribution, then I am not fulfilling my obligation to the organization. Second, I feel that the leader has the formal and informal power, and the access to resources, to uniquely have a positive impact on the organization. The followers can do well enough on their own, but they will do better if the leader puts emphasis on helping them to do better. I see servant leadership as a more engaged, vastly superior approach compared with laissez-faire leadership.

The other style that I reject -- and this is more a matter of personal taste than one based on evidence that it is genuinely inferior -- is bureaucratic leadership. Bureaucratic leadership has been defined as one that emphasizes the creation of rules that followers must follow, as a means of ensuring that the followers are pursuing the organization's objectives (Krause & O'Connell, 2011). The issue that I take with bureaucratic leadership is that situations are constantly changing, and that rules remove adaptability. Rules and regulations place constraints on the ability of followers to solve problems. I understand that as a control mechanism, they have a role, but ultimately bureaucracy slows things down. I believe, based on my experience, that most people within most organizations have a high degree of intellectual capability, and do not need to rely on bureaucratic structures to do the right thing. More often, good people need to justify their decisions to those who cannot function without rules and regulations, but the people who work under me are smart people who can handle the ambiguity of the real world, and would only be constrained if they were held to the rigid structures that bureaucracy demands. Other leaders might feel differently, but rules to me….....

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