Types of leadership

In my last post I talked about the nine points to be a good leader, if you haven’t read it go check it out in my website, in this post I’m going to talk you about the three types of leadership that exist. Autocratic, democratic and Laissez-faire.

Autocratic 

Let’s start with Autocratic. This type of leadership is characterized by the individual control of the leader over all decision and a small contribution of the group members. Autocratic leaders squally make decisions based on their ideas and judgments and rarely accept the advice of the rest. Some of the characteristics of this type of leadership are the little input from the rest of the group, all the important decisions are made by the leader, the leader decides the work methods and processes, the leaders tend to have a highly structure and very rigid work process, the leaders don’t usually trust important tasks to group members, they usually discourage the creativity and have an excessive emphasis on rules. The advantages of this type of leadership are that it helps in quick decisions-making, it’s mostly effective in small groups and handles well situations under pressure. The disadvantages are the discourage of the moral of the group, force other members to strictly follow the directions, non-utilization of creative ideas and the success depends on how efficient is the leader.

Democratic

 

Democratic leadership. This leadership encourages the community participation, letting employees decide more about their functions and sufficient powers to make their decisions. Personnel can express their opinions and aren’t limited to receive orders. The characteristics of this leadership are the encouragement of sharing ideas and opinions, empowering group members, balanced decision making, distribution of responsibility, higher productivity, encouragement of creativity and increased moral of employees. The advantages are the ability to have creative solutions to different problems, balanced decision making, employees are satisfied with the job and encourage innovation. On the other hand, the disadvantages are the delay in the decision making process, failure of communication among the team which leads to uncompleted projects, it will decrease the moral and job satisfaction of the employees when they feel they are unheard and the possible lack of skill will carry to not find solutions to problems.

 Laissez-faire 

The last type of leadership is Laissez-faire. It comes from the French word “let it happen.” This refers to the total omission of the manager in giving orders, letting others take actions. This usually happens when the strategic directors don’t have a deeper understanding of the business. Generally, this leadership conducts to low profitability and productivity levels. The characteristics of this leadership are the very little guidance from leaders, employees are free to make their decisions, leaders provide the tools and resources, the group member have to solve the problems on their own and the power is given to the employees. The advantages of this style of leadership are employees have a greater job satisfaction, increased scope for development of employees, positive motivation and utilization of employees potentiality.The disadvantages are the lack of guidance, ignorance of the leader, the employees are less skilled and less competent.

I hope you liked this little lesson about the types of leadership and their advantages and disadvantages. Don’t forget to check my last posts and wait for the next post.