Leadership Styles: Autocratic Vs Transformational Leadership

Autocratic Leadership Style

Question:

Discuss about the Effective Leadership Skills and Styles.

The first one is the autocratic leadership style. This leadership style is also called the authoritarian leadership style. This style is characterized by the leaders taking an overall control of the decisions and providing little scope to the members of the groups. They make choices based on their own ideas and judgments (De Hoogh et al., 2015). They rarely invite advice, suggestions or feedbacks from the followers. They mainly dictate all the work methods as well as processes. Group members are rarely trusted regarding any decisions or other significant tasks. This type of leaders highly discourages creative thinking and encourages working styles which are highly structured and very rigid. This working condition stresses the workers and makes them feel disrespected and not cared by the company. Some may even become demotivated and tensed, fearful and resentful. Lack of empowerment in decision-making processes results in developing low morale and lack of commitment from the employees. However, they also have certain advantages (Vail, 2014). They bring out positive results when adverse situations arise all of a sudden and urgency rises to take decisions quickly.

The second type of leadership skill is the transformational leadership skills. This type of leadership style makes the leaders work in harmony with their followers by setting a clear vision and guiding them through every path and helping them to align with the objectives of the organization (Avolio & Yammarino et al., 2013). It is determined as the model of integrity as well as fairness. This type of leadership encourages others not only to work beyond expectations but also invites followers with their suggestions, advices and feedbacks. This help in developing an environment of innovation and creativity. The leaders provide support in innovation and goals (Kark & Shamir, 2013). At the same time, they inspire and motivate them to look beyond their individual interest and work towards goals. Building stronger and trust based relationship is yet another attribute of this leadership.

Steve jobs had been an American entrepreneur, industrial designer as well as business magnate who have served the position of the chairman, co founder as well as the CEO of Apple.inc. He was an autocratic ruler and had received tremendous success with his leadership style.

A very good example of the transformational leader is Richard Branson. He is the founder of the Virgin Atlantic groups. It is one of the most recognized as well as respected brands that has over 400 companies.

Transformational Leadership Style

Steve Jobs was an autocratic ruler. Critics are of the opinion that he had a meticulous eye for every minute detail of the organization. He was extremely demanding form his employees. Many of his co-followers who has worked under him had described him to show manipulative behaviour and had even described his behaviour in meetings to be rude, authoritative as well as obnoxious. Job used to exhibit a domineering presence for which many of his employees used to fear him and his consideration levels were rather low (Heracleous & Klaering, 2017). However, his autocratic style helped him for making a quick decision whenever any certain serious conditions arise and he had complete control over the decisions taken for his company. He was very demanding not only towards his employees but also towards himself. Some of the deadlines are so short that it used to become difficult for the employees to achieve. He centralized his authority in such a way that he never used to give chance to his subordinates in decision making as he had less trust on employees. His conceited and self satisfying attitudes failed to motivate his employees in many severe situations (Keller, 2017).

On the other hand, Richard Branson was a very famous transformational leader. He possessed many important characteristics like articulating a vision and also communicating high performance expectations with the subordinates. Not only that, he always tried to set up a positive example for his subordinates and often showed sensitivity to individual follower’s needs. He had provided lot of encouragement in developing a correct team attitude and provided intellectual stimulation for his employees (Williams, 2017). His high levels of expectations from his employees gave his subordinates the self confidence to persist in the face of setbacks and often resulted in exceptional performance. Unlike the employees of Jobs who used to fear him, the employees of Branson took him as a fun, warm, friendly, risk taking and was competitive but in a positive way. Unlike Jobs who had highly self-satisfying attitudes, Branson treated his employees of all levels as equal and considered them as family and treated them with respect. Unlike job, he also welcomes feedback and suggestions from his employees which made them feel important and loved in the organization (Lambert, Bassell & Friedman, 2017).

While I was placed as the leader of a team, I experienced a number of events which reflected both my weakness and my strengths as a team leader. I was appreciated by my team members due to my multitasking caliber. I was able to effectively handle a large number of tasks single handedly like guiding the new joiners, completing the report sheet of their performance, assigning tasks to them, training them about minute skill which enhance their working styles, conducting meetings with directors and all efficiently. Another strength that I had was my communication skills. Not only I had the habit of active listening skills but also exhibited effective feedback giving and receiving kills which made the employees comfortable and felt respected by the organization. The weakness I had was my poor social skills. I was not good at relationship development and can never maintain an informal relationship. Moreover, I lacked empathy which made the workers think that I was bossy. Another weakness was my intercultural communication skills. I did not know how to handle conversations with people from other backgrounds and often made remark or performed activities that hurt them. Moreover, I also lacked the ability to implement creativity and innovation at workplace which made the workplace environment boring and monotonous to the workers and they failed to gather zeal in their activities. All these affected productivity.

References:

Anderson, N., Poto?nik, K., & Zhou, J. (2014). Innovation and creativity in organizations: A state-of-the-science review, prospective commentary, and guiding framework. Journal of Management, 40(5), 1297-1333.

Avolio, B. J., & Yammarino, F. J. (Eds.). (2013). Introduction to, and overview of, transformational and charismatic leadership. In Transformational and Charismatic Leadership: The Road Ahead 10th Anniversary Edition (pp. xxvii-xxxiii). Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

De Hoogh, A. H., Greer, L. L., & Den Hartog, D. N. (2015). Diabolical dictators or capable commanders? An investigation of the differential effects of autocratic leadership on team performance. The Leadership Quarterly, 26(5), 687-701.

Deming, D. J. (2017). The growing importance of social skills in the labor market. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 132(4), 1593-1640.

Heracleous, L., & Klaering, L. A. (2017). The circle of life: Rhetoric of identification in Steve Jobs' Stanford speech. Journal of Business Research, 79, 31-40.

Kark, R., & Shamir, B. (2013). The dual effect of transformational leadership: Priming relational and collective selves and further effects on followers. In Transformational and Charismatic Leadership: The Road Ahead 10th Anniversary Edition (pp. 77-101). Emerald Group Publishing Limited..

Keller, J. (2017). New Opera in Santa Fe: The (R) evolution of Steve Jobs. The Hopkins Review, 10(4), 633-636.

Lambert, S., Bassell, M., & Friedman, H. H. (2017). Leadership in a Knowledge Economy: Building an Innovative Marketing and Branding Organization.

Ruben, B. D. (2015). Intercultural communication competence in retrospect: Who would have guessed?. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 48, 22-23.

Vail III, K. E. (2014). Experimentally exploring how the awareness of existential freedom influences support for autocratic leadership styles among individuals high and low in neuroticism. University of Missouri-Columbia.

Williams, D. (2017). Richard Branson as a Global Magnate. What to learn from him about Business.