3.3 Assignment: Journal – Contingency Leadership
Journal – Contingency Leadership
- Path-Goal Leadership
Based on the Path-Goal Leadership results, I often use participative style of leadership, at a score of 29. I tend to take corrective measures and guide my teams towards the right path whenever handling a project. I prefer motivating and empowering my followers to become more productive and feel confident about themselves. I like this style of leadership because it favors consultations with followers, and taking their ideas on board before deciding on how to proceed. When my team is faced with an obstacle, I take the initiative to help them work on a solution.
I am least comfortable with the achievement-oriented style of path-goal leadership. I do not like setting challenging goals for my teams although I expect everyone to give their all. I also do not prefer this style of leadership because it involves the leader coercing their followers to show excellent work achievements. I believe this style minimizes opportunities for feedback from followers since the leader puts too much focus on achievement. I am also least comfortable with the style since it puts too much emphasis on achievement leading to burnout and fatigue. Turnover rates tend to be high in environments where leaders coerce their followers. As such, organizations end up losing their best workers causing high staffing costs.
The participative leadership style matches the needs of my followers in the workplace in that every member of my team depends on my input when tasks get difficult (Vieira et al, 2018). My direction and support are highly appreciated in teams I lead. However, I tend to change my style depending on the situation to match the teams’ needs. When anyone seems stuck, I am available to guide them in the right direction by identifying goals and objectives of the task at hand.
- Adaptive Leadership
The adaptive leadership test shows that I am inclined to exhibit regulate distress, maintain disciplined attention, and protect leadership voices from below behaviors. These behaviors indicate that I provide a safe environment for my team members to solve difficult problems and maintain calmness and confidence in conflict situations. I am also open to radical ideas from my followers, but I tend to scrutinize them before I can apply any of them.
I believe these behaviors have helped my leadership style, especially when solving persistent, recurring problems. I inspire my teams to identify problems and involve everyone in searching for possible solutions. I have utilized these behaviors when experimenting with different solutions for problems arising at work. I tend to gather diverse viewpoints to get many options while rewarding team performance with independence and autonomy.
Using the three behaviors of adaptive leadership gets me emotionally aware while not letting other people’s feelings distract my team’s decision-making process. This has been crucial in navigating business environments as my teams learn to embrace uncertainty. The result has always led to learning through reflection and self-correction as we experiment with different solutions.
I would like to work on identifying the adaptive challenge and giving the work back to the people behaviors, which I scored moderately low. I would love to easily find solutions to problems that seem unsolvable, change more with circumstances, and adopt a more experimental mind-set while changing the attitudes of my team members towards professional development (Northouse, 2021). To give work back to people, I will involve getting team members to assume greater responsibility, which could be difficult, especially in instances where I am working with people who are comfortable being told what to do. I need to let my followers take the initiative when solving problems.
- Commitment to Action
I have noticed that our company is experiencing a high turnover. The reason has been partly due to the recent lockdown where employees were required to work from home. Working from home provided them with more opportunities to make money online leading to resignations from their day jobs. To resolve the high turnover issues, our HR manager has tasked me with finding a lasting solution to this problem. I think I will need to apply adaptive leadership behaviors in this situation. I will invest time in digging deeper to know what is going on. I will also consult an external HR specialist to find how they have solved similar issues in the past.
It will be crucial to look at the compensation structure of different employees in different departments. I will then talk to the employees about the challenges they are facing and what they see relating to company growth. This will allow me to develop ideas and strategies that would convince the workers to stay with the organization. This could mean extending more incentives to them or even altering the organization culture to make the employees feel more comfortable and appreciated in the workplace (Czuchry, 2019). However, the issue of changing culture might face opposition from different workers, necessitating a careful approach. It would be important to ascertain whether the problem emanates from lack of accountability in teams leading to frustrations. In this case, adaptive leadership would be useful in approaching such problems.
References
Czuchry, A. J. (2019). Adaptive leadership diagnostics: A conceptual framework drawing upon three generations of business leaders. Journal of Global Business Management, 15(2). 15-26.
Northouse, P. G. (2021). Leadership: Theory and practice (9th ed.). Sage Publications.
Vieira, V. A., Perin, M. G., & Sampaio, C. H. (2018). The moderating effect of managers’ leadership behavior on salespeople’s self-efficacy. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 40, 150-162.
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