Determining_Your_Perfect_Posiiton_Paper

Determining Your Perfect Position Paper Yvette Metzger University of Phoenix LDR/531 July 10, 2012 Rovella Phillips Many organizations today are expanding and restructuring while adjusting to the common needs of the market. Businesses have an open opportunity to position themselves to take the market share. Depending on how well they define their company culture, the business will display positive results. . Everyone has a dream of a perfect position in their career. With each perfect position, a plan and goal has to be derived to ensure that perfect position matches your dream successfully. In business, role models can determine positions that best suit the business. These role models have worked dedicatedly to reach their way to top management and be able to lead a business through innovations successfully. These leaders have the ability to choose the leadership style that works best for their personality. As an employee seeking a top management position where I would be able to describe the leadership model that works best for me is a dream that one day might come true. Many strengths and weaknesses would apply to my leadership style. Each leadership style has a theory that has been researched in business to help companies better understand the leadership approaches. The leadership style that best suites my personality is the Participative leadership style. This leadership style discusses the way leaders makes business related decisions shares the same equity of importance on what the decisions cover. Victor Vroom and Phillip Yetton’s leader-participation model relates leadership behavior and participation in decision making. Like path-goal theory, it says leader behavior must adjust to reflect the task structure. The model is normative—it provides a decision tree of seven contingencies and five leadership styles for determining the form and amount of participation in decision making (Robbins & Judge, 2011). There are a variety of strengths in the participative leadership style. The benefits in applying this theory include being goal-driven to achieve set goals and same time encouraging follower growth. This leadership style has also helped to improve the decision making skills of followers, thus, putting them in shape for future leadership positions. The input of all team members with relevant knowledge and skills of subject matter, helps produce a more creative and innovative ideas. Another strength is the employee’s ability to demonstrate their ability in leadership which prompted promotion. Participative Leadership greatly aids in shifting leadership responsibilities from the team leader to the rest of the members, so that power is shared among them. It is clearly beneficial when team efforts are expedient and when quality of output is preferred above productivity. It promotes trusts from the leader to the subordinates, which yields collaboration, groupthink, motivation and job satisfaction. This leadership style helps a leader to fashion out and sustain improved production over a protracted period of time. With every strength there is a weakness to follow in the participative leadership style. This style wastes a lot of time to resolve a problem from the identification stage to the resolution, a bottleneck towards the making of time sensitive decisions. It does not work well in every type of work station, especially huge organizations because of the slow pace of decision making. Another weakness is that it usually is not effective in an organization that has a large pool of unskilled and new-hires, who are still not equipped to partake in any concrete type of decision making. Management might not be open to disclose very sensitive business information to all employees, irrespective of the fact that such information may be very relevant in the discharge of their duties. However, vital information no doubt could be shared in participative leadership style, not minding the sensitivity, which may result to information leakage and dysfunctional conflict among employees (Shennu, 2012). Businesses have researched a variety of theories in leadership to compare and contrast the differences. Various leadership theories which include: Trait theories, Behavioral theories, Contingency theories, Situational Leadership theory, Path-Goal theory, Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) theory. Each theory has a better suit for every different type of business. All business has a different culture that each business theory applies a better fit for. Several scholars have come up with divers perspectives of theories on leadership, all aimed on how and when best to produce strong leaders that can lead the production, service and people oriented enterprises to optimize effectiveness. Leadership should come from the business mission statement and be focused on motivating employees to meet the goals of the company. Trait theories focus on the personal qualities and characteristics of leaders who were seen as charismatic, optimistic and zealous. Trait theories attempt to separate effective leaders from mere leaders by their personalities, social, physical, and intellectual attributes. Thereafter, trait theories were narrowed down and organized around the Big Five, which singled out extraversion to be the most salient trait that effective leaders possess- it is more people-oriented than leader effectiveness. Behavioral theories emerged after some shortcomings of the earlier trait theories, and wondered if there was some special ways that great leaders behaved. Initiating Structure and Consideration, the most recognized theory on behavior of leaders, emanated from Ohio researchers in late 1940s. Initiating structure deals with precision in job description, structure and role by leader to followers to attain set goals, whereas Consideration harps on the human relations aspect of the job: to motivate, inspire and satisfy workers first, who later willingly pays back with loyalty and optimal performance at work stations (Robbins and Judge, 2011). The Contingency theories focus on situational influences. Mr. Fieldler, postulated the first detailed contingency theory, and states that how successful a leader is depends on his/her leadership styles, and that an individual’s leadership style is fixed (Robbins and Judge, 2011). The Situational leadership theory harps on followers, and hints that effective leadership is realized by choosing the right leadership style contingent upon the degree that the ability and willingness of followers are geared towards accomplishing a definite task (Robbins and Judge, 2011). The path-Goal theory states that the leader is responsible to inform, support and provide the subordinates with all the necessary resources needed to achieve a set purpose. The Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) Theory, assumes that due to time constraint, leaders tend to build a rapport with a small group of their followers, who make up a ‘subtle Gang’ that are trusted, favored, and privileged to receive special attention from the leader. The rest of the followers are the less favored ‘outcasts’ group (Robbins and Judge, 2011). The leadership style that best suits me is a laissez-faire style because my personality is type B. Laissez-faire leadership style is a type of style that “allows a team member to work on their own” (University of Phoenix, 2012). Based on assessments taken, I found that I am more people oriented than I am task oriented. Type B personalities are more productive under stress. Type B personalities are slow to anger and are patient and they don’t need to be the group leader or control every situation. The weaknesses of having an laissez-fair leadership style coupled with a type B personality, is that if your team or subordinates are not motivated to do the work without your constant supervision, then they may not meet deadlines and do a substandard job. In management, I do not think this type of leadership style would be effective in helping me perform my job duties. My leadership style is a balance of people orientation and task orientation with people oriented being slightly higher than tasks. From my leadership style and my self-assessment, I can detect that the participative leadership style works well with me, which basically relies on the authority, cognition and feedback from the employees. With this in mind, I am able to determine that these various roles in the organizations that suits my leadership style: Team leader, who inspires and motivates team to achieve our set goals; Mediator role, in case there’s a conflict, I would be there to see it’s resolved functionally; and Human Resource Manager, a role that mandates me to handle the security, personal and skill development issues. In conclusion, I believe I possess the knowledge, drive, personality and values to succeed and reach my goals. My goals are to work on the area of trust and disinclination to discipline employees. That along with some mentoring and training in strategic planning can make my goals a reality. References Robbins, S. P., & Judge, T. A. (2011). Organizational behavior (14th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education Shennu, B. (2012). The Disadvantages of Participative Leadership Theories. Retrieved from http://www.ehow.com/list_7428304_disadvantages-participative-leadership-theories.html University of Phoenix. (2012). Leadership and Team Skills Assessment [Multimedia]. Retrieved from University of Phoenix, LDR-531 Organizational Leadership website.