Example research essay topic: Transformational Leaders Leadership Styles - 1,592 words

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Running head: LEADERSHIP COURSEWORK Leadership Coursework July 03, 2009 Leadership Coursework Question 1. The concept of transformational leadership was first introduced by James MacGregor Burns in 1978, when he published a leadership book focusing on various types of leaders and leadership styles. Transformational leadership was the most important style identified by Burns within his theory of leadership. Transformational leadership, according to Burns, is a process where both leaders and those who follow leaders collaborate and help each other to reach a higher level of motivation and moral.

As the term implies, transformational leadership transforms lives of other people and organizations. It changes lives, values and perceptions, aspirations and expectations. This type of leadership, unlike other leadership styles, is based on the personality of a leader, on his personal traits and his capacity to make changes through communicating goals and vision. The main characteristics of a transformational leader are as follows: the leader should be creative, interactive, visionary, empowering and passionate.

Being creative, transformational leader is expected to consistently seek out new products, ideas, and ways he performs tasks. Creative leaders are perceiving and hard working, they are independent thinkers who are comfortable with ambiguity and complexity. Creative transformational leaders go far beyond recognizing existing needs of their followers; they always seek to engage the follower and to broader needs. Their creativity is implemented through seeking our new ideas and challenging the status quo. Creative transformational leaders always see the problem from various angles and solve them effectively. This type of leader moves followers to transcend their self-interest for the sake and good of the team or working group, encouraging followers to achieve higher levels of personal action.

Creative leaders inspire followers to aspire to and to achieve much more than they ever considered to achieve. Interactive transformational leaders provide better direction and are great communicators. For example, Ronald Reagan and John Fitzgerald Kennedy were interactive transformational leaders. This characteristic of leadership implies consistent involvement with followers, regular meetings or management by wandering around. These leaders are concerned rather with people instead of focusing on the processes. Visionary transformational leaders communicate the vision; in other words, transformational leaders act as visionaries to create a shared vision.

They attract commitment and energize their followers, establish and maintain a standard of excellence, create meaning for their followers, and connecting the present and the future. This characteristic implies that visionary leaders are capable of creating a desired future state, and communicating successfully to the followers this state. As the term implies, empowering transformational leaders need capable followers to whom they can delegate decision making. The leaders empower their followers as they are able to translation intention into desirable reality, communicating and sustaining it for their followers.

This empowerment leads to more empowerment, resulting in more power and letting followers to achieve their fullest potential. The compelling nature and strength of this vision empower the followers to become better, to excel and to exceed expectations. Empowering leader increases individual autonomy and creates friendly environment of trust, honesty, reliability and openness. Finally, passionate leaders are those who are committed to work. According to Chang, being passionate leader is the most important competitive advantage. Transformational leaders are passionate about their followers and about the tasks they perform.

Passionate leaders lose a sense of time, forget about their own personal problems and focus on their followers, feeling in control and competent. Passionate leaders acknowledge that without passion the vision is short-lived and there is no direction. Apostle Paul is a good example of a passionate transformational leader. Question 2. Shifting followers to self leadership from dependent to independent can be quite difficult and challenging task.

This can be achieved by empowering self-managed work teams and turning followers into self-leaders. Self leadership is a process through which followers influence themselves to achieve self-motivation and self-direction necessary to perform. As far as self-leadership is based on specific sets of cognitive and behavioral strategies, it can be assumed that to shift followers to self leadership from dependent to independent the leader should be focused at positively influencing followers performance outcomes. The strategies used to encourage and foster self-leadership in followers fall under three major categories, namely, natural reward strategies, behavior-focused strategies and constructive thought pattern strategies.

Natural reward strategies are mostly focused on pleasant and enjoyable tasks and activities and are aimed to create situations in which the follower is rewarded or motivated by the activity or task itself. These strategies imply two major approaches: shaping the followers perceptions of the task or activity by emphasizing on its rewarding pleasant aspect, and building more enjoyable and pleasant features into activity or task so that the follower perceived the value obtained from the activity itself naturally rewarding. Behavior-focused strategies are aimed to enhance self-awareness leading to successful management of behaviors that may involve necessary but sometimes unpleasant tasks. According to the self-control and self-management theories, behavior-focused strategies include but are not limited to self-goal setting, self-correcting feedback, self-reward, and self-observation. Finally, constructive thought pattern strategies are related to the management of cognitive processes and imply three major tools for shaping followers patterns: positive self-talk, self-analysis, and mental imagery of positive and successful performance outcomes.

Question 3. Leadership applied in groups and working teams can lead to positive results and contribute to success. Team leadership is different from traditional top-down leadership model. First, the responsibility for effective work in teams and groups is shared by the group instead of being on the leaders shoulders.

The working group has the right to influence final decision. Team leadership also assumes that the importance of ones power and position are de emphasized, while the focus is on collaboration. Team leadership implies that the leader treats a team or working group as a collective and interactive team, while avoiding perceiving it as a set of individuals. The task-oriented functions of a working group are also shared by the group, instead of being performed and controlled by the leader alone. Group maintenance functions are also shared and emphasized by the working group as a whole instead of being performed systematically. Socio emotional processes and interactions are also emphasized by team leaders.

Finally, team leaders encourage expressions of working group members feelings and needs and are discussed openly during meetings. Team leader is focused on both performance and development, making an effective teamwork a norm for all his actions. The leader uses all possible leadership tools, such as mentoring, tutoring, counseling, coaching, and concentrating on enhancing team performance. Team leader also uses informal processes, shows respect, values and celebrate achievements of the team members. The leaders feelings show loyalty, commitment, trust in his team and pride. Effective leader shares the credit, talks last during the discussions, letting all members to speak first.

The leader also gives team members decision making authority and from time to time take turns appointing team member to facilitate and lead meetings. Being a leader in the team or working group, there are few things to be taken into consideration, namely, team goal, productive participation by all team members, trust, communication, a feeling of belonging, creativity, and risk taking, to mention a few. A good team leader should have commitment to people (an effective team leader spends time building the team), a desire to serve and support, inspiration (team and working group members expect to be motivated and inspired by team leadership), enthusiasm, energy and expertise, willingness to take responsibility (team leaders are tested while they face challenges and when these challenges arise, the effective leader will need to shoulder responsibility to ensure that all problems are fixed and his team is strengthened as a result), and ability to achieve more as a team, because team is a team only when there is a synergy within the group. Question 4. Gain and blame behaviors in response to mistake are two opposites. While the first behavioral pattern is positive and allows to derive benefit from mistakes, the second behavioral pattern is destructive and negative.

Gain behavioral pattern is an exploring, while blame behavior is judging. People with blame behavior often overlook greater misdeeds, while focusing in on minor ones. Gain behavior is about remaining calm while blame behavior is showing emotion and inability to maintain self-control. Gain behavior is about trying to find out exactly what happened, while blame behavior is merely reacting to what happened without any attempt to understand the origin of this mistake. Gain behavior is about trying to understand on the process getting it wrong that allowed failure of mistake take place, while blame behavior is blaming people for what had happened. People with blame behaviors are mostly focused on finding guilty instead of trying to help.

Gain behavior is proving support, while blame behavior is finding fault. Gain behavior is assuming the person who made a mistake wants to learn, while blame behavior is assuming that he should feel guilty. Gain behavior is about seeming mistakes as something that must be avoided, while blame behavior is seeing mistakes as a part of a learning process. In such a way, gain behavior is more productive and beneficial, as such people are not afraid to make mistakes; they understand that people can make mistakes even with devastating consequences but they never blame people for that. People with gain behavior understand that mistakes should be tolerated and even encouraged when people can learn from them; they learn from mistakes and avoid making the same mistake because they share the lessons learned. Finally, when such people make mistakes, they are not afraid to take responsibility for them.

Research essay sample on Transformational Leaders Leadership Styles