Leadership Reflection – Part 1

Part 1 – What Is Your Leadership Style?

Leadership Style

Leadership is to get the job done

Leadership style is a leader’s unique talents to set tasks, to provide guiding, to build up a team, and to achieve the objectives. Brain Neese in his 2014 article “6 Business leadership styles” identified coercive (“Do what I tell you”), authoritative(“Come with me”), affiliative(“People come first”), democratic(“what do you think”), coaching (“Try this”), and pacesetting(“Do as I do”) as the 6 basic leadership styles in business. “Each one springing from different components of emotional intelligence. Each style has a distinct effect on the working atmosphere of a company, division, or team, and, in turn, on its financial performance (Goleman,2000)”

My first job was a pharmacologist in a China-FDA Nanjing branch, that part of this job was the yearly inspection of the local pharmaceutical industry. This work experience trained me to have coercive leadership style when rules or theories are hard to explain but jobs need to be done as regulated, which I learned from those inspectors of the health department. 

Style is a social influence process

In their review paper “Leadership Style”, T.S. and D.R (2014) reviewed the literature of leadership style. They identified leadership is “a social influence process in which the leader seeks the voluntary participation of subordinates in an effort to reach organization goals… and leadership is the relatively consistent pattern of behavior that characterizes a leader.”

When I was a computer programmer in a company in Connecticut, my boss in R&D department was an experienced former IBM research director whose leadership style is a combination of authoritative style in setting the mission and coaching style in guiding us. His vision pushed us for innovation, his implementation strategy enabled us to achieve constant progress, his ability to monitor research progress and his talents to assess our frustrations had guided us in that project’s successful development. I learned from him this researcher leadership style of how to assess a frustrated clueless situation and how to provide guidance with references.

Leadership Assessment

“Leadership Assessment is a process for identifying and describing an individual’s unique characteristics as they pertain to leading, managing, and directing others and how such characteristics fit into a given position’s requirements (AAI, 2018)”.

 A leader is the person who set the understanding of a project’s or a firm’s objectives and supervises its developing progress, a leader is the person who provides technical or managerial supports a project and coordinates its team resources, so that a leader’s ability to “develop the mission, create and implement strategy, push the limits of innovation, and motivate employees to better performance(AAI, 2018)” is critical to the success of the firm or the development of a project, so that it is important for a firm to assess these leadership attributes in finding its leaders.

Leadership Instruments

Leadership instruments are research approaches to identify the relationship between leadership style (behavior, traits, etc.) and leadership effectiveness. Leadership study analyzes leadership attributes, set leadership measurement scales, and conduct leadership style evaluation for the purpose of finding the best potential leader to achieve the organization’s mission and objectives.

It is important to analyze the organization to start the leadership assessment because how the subordinates would follow is also critical to leadership effectiveness. A “do what I told you” coercive leadership style can be a misalignment in a research institute because research is to explore unknown, while strictly regulated industry such as accounting firms can’t afford to be led by a leader whose expertise is to find new fanciful routes to move around numbers in accounting books.

Also, “how to find more successful ways of interacting with followers is also very important (Zorn & Violanti, 1993). The ability of how a leader can effectively communicate with followers can effectively affect a team’s involvement, the project’s objective implementation and the team’s commitments to the project’s timely progress, and thus enhance leadership effectiveness.

References

AAI (2018) Leadership Assessment. ASSESSMENT ASSOCIATES INTERNATIONAL. Retrieved from http://aai-assessment.com/services/leadership-assessment

Coleman, Daniel (2000). Leadership That Gets Results. Harvard Business Review R00204-PDF-ENG, Page 13. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/product/leadership-that-gets-results/an/R00204-PDF-ENG

Neese, Brian (2000). 6 Leadership Styles in Business. Southeastern University online learning.  Retrieved from https://online.seu.edu/6-leadership-styles-in-business/

Zorn, T., Violanti, M. (1993) Measuring Leadership Style: A review of leadership style instruments for classroom use. Communication Education, Volume 42, 1993. Retrieved from https://nca.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03634529309378913?journalCode=rced20#.W98KxpNKiM8

Nanjundeswaraswamy T. S. * and Swamy D. R. (2014) Review Paper Leadership Style. Advances in Management. Vol. 7(2) February 2014 Retrieved from https://www.mnsu.edu/activities/leadership/leadership_styles.pdf