What is Leadership? Types of Leaders.

Leadership Introduction

• Leadership is the process of influencing the thought and action of the other people to attain the desired objectives.
• A leadership style is a way of providing direction, implementing plan and motivating people.
• Good leadership is to win the support of the people.
• Every leader may not be a good manager but every manager must be a good leader.

Some of the quotes on leadership

• “The quality of behavior of individual whereby they guide people on their activities in organizing efforts.” -Chestar Barnaid.
• “Leadership is a process of influencing others to attain goals” - Little field.
• “Leadership is the knack of getting other people to follow you and to do willingly the things you want them to do” – DR. Bittle

Importance of leadership

• Determination of goal.
• Organization of activities.
• Achieving co-ordination.
• Representation of workers.
• Providing guidance.
• Inspiration of employees.
• Building employee morale.
• Facilitating changes.
• Leadership is related to a situation.
• Employees must be satisfied with the types of leadership provided.
• Goal setter.

Functions of Leader

• External group representative.
• Surrogate for individual representative.
• Controller of internal relationship within the organization.
• Administrator of rewards and punishment.
• Arbitrator and mediator.
• Symbol of the group.
• Father figure.

Qualities of Leader

1. Managerial abilities:

• Plan, organizes, make decision effective encourages cooperative and coordination.
• Assists nurse subordination in solving the problems and provides consistent feedback.
• Provide rationale for difficult decision.
• Assess abilities of the worker guides them to develop new skill.
• Know his job and does it well and has confidence in self and others.
• Welcome different opinion and is more interested in giving than receiving.
• Provides the worker with adequate facilities.
• Interpersonal relationship:
• Show supportive and caring behavior.
• Is a good listener and sensitive to the other needs.
• Guides and motivates to act and work together with all types of workers.
• Establishes relationship and is able to work with other harmoniously.
• . Nature of person:
• Reliable, open, honest and sincere.
• Show a sense of humor, tactful, friendly and loyal.
• Calm and charismatic, modest and patient.
• Positive, energetic, hard worker, happy, and enthusiastic.
• Show a balance between work and home-life on personal life.
• Credibility and forward thinking:
• Act as a role model and influence others.
• Act as a activist.
• Challenger and creative thinker.
• Change with agent innovator
• Risk taken and courageous.
• Act as a facilitator and solution seeker
• Professionalism :
• Committed to the profession.
• Maintain confidentiality.
• Instill hope and honesty to the profession.
• Stand for right while considering other’s right (assertive)
• Advocacy:
• Act as an advocate for nursing profession.
• Act as patient advocate.
• Act as an advocate for nursing education and of student for the right and standard.

TYPES of Leaders

AUTOCRATIC / AUTHORITARIAN LEADERSHIP-

1. Autocratic or authorial leadership:

• The leader alone establishes polices and make plans.
• He instructs employees about the job and in return demand strict obedience and power.
• The leader arranges physical set-up so that people cannot form the social group.
• The psychological needs of employees are not considered.
• The mutual trust is virtually eliminated.
• The maximum productivity is achieved by making worker completely subject to management's dictation.
• Criterion used by authoritarian leader-
• -“Do what as I said or else”
• -“Do as I say because I am good to you”
• PERSONALITY OF AUTOCRATIC LEADER:

1. Firm personality, insistent, self assured, highly directive dominating and with or without intention.
2. Has higher concern for work than for the people who perform the task.
3. Uses the effort of workers to the best possible advantages, show no regard to the interest of employees.
4. Set rigid standard and method of performances and the subordinates to obey the rules,
5. Make all decision and passes orders to workers.
6. There is minimal group participation or not at all from the workers.
7. Think that what he/she plans and does is best. May listen to them but not influenced by their suggestion.
8. Has no trust or confidence in subordinates, who in turn fear and feel they have nothing much in common.
9. Exercise power, manipulates subordinate to act according to his goal plans and stays at the centre of attraction.

TYPES OF AUTOCRATIC LEADERSHIP:

1. Strict autocrat: It is one who relies on negative influences and gives order that must be obey without question. The subordinate’s behavior is motivated negatively by imposing penalty, criticism.

                -“Do what as I said or else”

1. Benevolent autocrat: It is the one who uses a positive motivation style. He disperses reward to his group. This is effective in getting higher productivity.

                  - “Do as I say because   I am good to you”

• Merit of autocratic leadership:

1. It can increases quality of work, save time and get fast result, especially in emergency.
2. It works well with employees who feel insecure with freedom and minor decision making.

• Demerit of autocratic leadership:

1. The leader get little information and ideas from employees.
2. One-way communication lead to communication breakdown, misunderstanding and costly error.
3. Lead to loss of human dignity, low morale, low productivity and massive resistance

1. DEMOCRATIC/ PARTICIPATIVE/ PERSON ORIENTED LEADERSHIP

• In this type of leadership the whole team is involved and accepts responsibilities for setting and achieving goal.
• The leader shows concern for his people than for higher production.
• The leader is not the key figure as in autocratic leadership.
• The leader work more as agent, therefore the team is not dependence on him and can work effectively in his absence.
• Merit of democratic leadership
• It can increases quality of work, and get fast result , especially in all critical situation.
• Demerit of democratic leadership:

• Participation of each member may take enormous amount of time.
• If not exercise properly may degenerate into complete loss of leadership‘s control.
• This style can be used by some leader as way of avoiding responsibilities.
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WRITTEN BY ~ SUKHDEEP SINGH