A lesson in leadership styles
In response to recent life events, a couple of very intelligent businessmen have mentioned the term "Autocratic Leadership" -- a term I vaguely recall from a couple of business classes at MSU. I decided to do a little research to refresh my memory on what an Autocratic Leader looks like. Apparently, the term was first thrown out in 1938 by some guy Kurt Lewin. What follows are direct quotes from a couple of different websites. Since I'm not turning in a paper for my good friends Amber or Laurie, I won't bother to cite my sources and will openly admit to plagarism.
The characteristics of an autocratic style include: Work methods that are dictated by the autocratic leader; Limited employee participation in most aspects of work; and Unilateral decision making by the leader. In the autocratic style, the leader takes decisions without consulting with others. The decision is made without any form of consultation. In Lewin's experiments, he found that this caused the most level of discontent.
Autocratic leadership is an extreme form of transactional leadership, where a leader exerts high levels of power over his or her employees or team members. People within the team are given few opportunities for making suggestions, even if these would be in the team's or organization’s interest. Most people tend to resent being treated like this. Because of this, autocratic leadership usually leads to high levels of absenteeism and staff turnover. Also, the team's output does not benefit from the creativity and experience of all team members, so many of the benefits of teamwork are lost. For some routine and unskilled jobs, however, this style can remain effective where the advantages of control outweigh the disadvantages.
I wasn't sure what Transactional Leadership was, so I decided to look that up, too. Again, what follows is direct plagarism from the internet.
Transactional Leadership -- This style of leadership starts with the premise that team members agree to obey their leader totally when they take a job on: the “transaction” is (usually) that the organization pays the team members, in return for their effort and compliance. As such, the leader has the right to “punish” team members if their work doesn’t meet the pre-determined standard. Team members can do little to improve their job satisfaction under transactional leadership. The leader could give team members some control of their income/reward by using incentives that encourage even higher standards or greater productivity. Alternatively a transactional leader could practice “management by exception”, whereby, rather than rewarding better work, he or she would take corrective action if the required standards were not met.
Transactional leadership is really just a way of managing rather a true leadership style, as the focus is on short-term tasks. It has serious limitations for knowledge-based or creative work, but remains a common style in many organizations.
I hope everyone who reads this will learn a few things about leadership that they didn't know before. If nothing else, its a great piece of useless information that could come in handy while playing Trivial Pursuit or watching Jeopardy.
The characteristics of an autocratic style include: Work methods that are dictated by the autocratic leader; Limited employee participation in most aspects of work; and Unilateral decision making by the leader. In the autocratic style, the leader takes decisions without consulting with others. The decision is made without any form of consultation. In Lewin's experiments, he found that this caused the most level of discontent.
Autocratic leadership is an extreme form of transactional leadership, where a leader exerts high levels of power over his or her employees or team members. People within the team are given few opportunities for making suggestions, even if these would be in the team's or organization’s interest. Most people tend to resent being treated like this. Because of this, autocratic leadership usually leads to high levels of absenteeism and staff turnover. Also, the team's output does not benefit from the creativity and experience of all team members, so many of the benefits of teamwork are lost. For some routine and unskilled jobs, however, this style can remain effective where the advantages of control outweigh the disadvantages.
I wasn't sure what Transactional Leadership was, so I decided to look that up, too. Again, what follows is direct plagarism from the internet.
Transactional Leadership -- This style of leadership starts with the premise that team members agree to obey their leader totally when they take a job on: the “transaction” is (usually) that the organization pays the team members, in return for their effort and compliance. As such, the leader has the right to “punish” team members if their work doesn’t meet the pre-determined standard. Team members can do little to improve their job satisfaction under transactional leadership. The leader could give team members some control of their income/reward by using incentives that encourage even higher standards or greater productivity. Alternatively a transactional leader could practice “management by exception”, whereby, rather than rewarding better work, he or she would take corrective action if the required standards were not met.
Transactional leadership is really just a way of managing rather a true leadership style, as the focus is on short-term tasks. It has serious limitations for knowledge-based or creative work, but remains a common style in many organizations.
I hope everyone who reads this will learn a few things about leadership that they didn't know before. If nothing else, its a great piece of useless information that could come in handy while playing Trivial Pursuit or watching Jeopardy.
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