Leadership style that refers to an approach of providing necessary direction, executing plans, and motivating people on the right track and task plays an instrumental role to make a difference in any institution. In this light, it is obvious that different leaders adopt various leadership quality- authoritarian, participative and delegative- based on their nature, vision, and mission. Interestingly, great leaders internalize and strongly support participative or democratic leadership style mainly because it gives an equal opportunity to the staffs to be a part of team that brings mutual understanding and respect among team members.
The democratic leadership, moreover, functions in collaborative competition by means of every staff member's skills and knowledge; a leader can hardly be omniscience. The skilled human resources fill out the achievement gap of a leader. On the contrary, a leader has to act like an authoritarian type under certain time pressure, situation, and environment when the team has necessary information and knowledge. Moreover, the delegative type of leadership, the President Obamanian style, has also its importance when a leader set up the priorities and believes that all delegates have full confidence on their tasks. Therefore, great leader becomes flexible to act according to the particular time and space tightly holding democratic type of leadership. both in heart and mind.
Building team work, abetting employees (worker) through professional training ,and providing them psychological and educational support are some of positive incentives for staffs that, great leader strongly believe, bring expected positive differences in their performance: "There is evidence that leaders who are considerate in their leadership style are higher performers and are more satisfied with their job"(Schriesheim, p 21). On the contrary to it, an authoritarian leader creates scary environment and, therefore, can not influence people: "Leadership is influencing people -- by providing purpose, direction, and motivation -- while operating to accomplish the mission and improving the organization." (US Army Handbook, P 13.)
A leader is he/she who can take best advantage of all employees' expertise and encourage them for more professional skills and education to make the organization ready to face the 21st century's challenges. When a leader shares out the horizontal structure of power in believing mutual respect, the organization runs autonomously offering the best result possible.
When an employee lacks very basic skills, autocratic style, management control, may be effective for a time being, however too much relied on it damages the performance of the organization on the whole. A person who behaves like a boss, thus, can not be considered as a good leader because he offers a lot of penalty and can not create conducive working environment that can directly hamper's the institutions Therefore, one has to implement democratic style of leadership to drive his/her vision and mission that brings respects among team members and provide everyone an equal opportunity of growing along with the progress of the organization(party).
Work Cited
Clark, D. R. (2008)http://nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/ahold/isd.html accessed on June 16, 2009.Schriesheim, Chester A.(2003)
'The Great High Consideration- High Initiating Structure Leadership Myth: Evidence on its Generalizability.' The Journal of Social 69(4):3-4
United States Army. "Military leadership, FM 22-100." Washington, D.C., 1973.
