Leadership is like beauty, hard to define but easy to notice. Although I believe leadership has to do with one personal traits, I also believe that leadership can be taught and learned the easy way through mentorship, experience, patience, collaboration and reading or the hard way through financial crisis, economic crisis or simply by the competitors.
There is no perfect Leadership style but all leaderships styles must lead to common leadership outcome such as attitude, effectiveness, cognition and behavior.
The attitude domain is about changing the way employees feel. It includes satisfaction, motivation, self-esteem commitment and emotion.
Effectiveness is a straightforward noticeable outcome represented in form of profitability, objective performance and bankruptcy.
Cognition includes perceived organizational structure, perceived climate, organizational support and self-schema while the behavioral domain of leadership is about actual or observable processes of an individual or group.
Your leadership style must fit your personal style as well as your objectives; here are some of different leaderships styles and situations to adopt each of them:
a- The behavioral leadership: it concentrates on leaders’ behaviors rather than their personal traits
usually adopted in production and it is split into two types:
· The relationship behaviors whereas the leader motivates the followers to carry on their effort.
· The task behaviors related to task achievement.
b- The contingency leadership: First introduced in the 60s and 70s, these theories study the behavior of leaders in various situations, therefore they propose that there is no best leader that fits in every situation, usually adopted in public sector and the success of the leadership is subject to situational factors related to clarity on the job mission, leader power/authority and healthy relationship between the leader and the followers.
c- Path-goal style: It states the role of the leader to motivate assist and guide employees to solve the problems to reach the goals. However, different subordinates or followers are motivated through different factors depending on their needs and preferences such as affiliations, preference for structure, self-efficacy or desire for control. Used when the purpose is to achieve a certain goal rather than to manage a process.
d- Leader member exchange style (LMX): the effectiveness of this leadership style is a result of a psycho-dynamic exchange between each pair of leaders and followers in other term LMX theory refers the successful leadership to the way the leader and followers perceive each other and themselves. However, it is always depending on the degree of job satisfaction, performance and commitment of the followers as well as the quality and the level of interaction between the leader and the followers, usually applied to manage small groups or structures.
e- Transformational styles: transformational leadership style is a process to motivate the followers based on their value to affect the performance and to envision a clear professional future career for them, it is usually adopted with Junior and mid senior employees and focuses on long term strategy, suitable for startups.
f- Transactional style: is a process of motivating followers by social trade or exchange to improve the performance of the employees to achieve the company goals. This exchange differs in nature from one leader to another like salary or bonus in return to accomplishments. Transactional leadership adopts risk free system to achieve goals on already set parameters. It is mainly applicable when the goals are short term ones or with senior employees.
Dr. Youssef Lamaa
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