Reflecting on Leadership Styles - Assignment Example

Commonly, when two people are asked to make a qualitative assessment of a person’s leadership style and leadership qualities, each of these people are looking to base the premise of their judgment on different factors and parameters. But in order to ensure fairness in the current assessment of the leaders, a very clearly outlined scope of assessment is used. This scope will be to analyze how the behaviors and actions of these leaders in specific instances were consistent, or not with contingency theory and the styles of leadership referred to in Goleman (2000) and Bjugstad et al (2006).

Aligning Leadership Styles to Challenges Priya Singh and Lillian Park, who are the Associate Dean and Chief of Staff to the Dean at Stanford University, and the human resource manager of Mechanical Lloyd respectively. According to the contingency theory, there is no single leadership style or leadership behavior that can be identified as being exclusively right or wrong. Rather, a leader’s ability to manipulate a prevailing situation and adopt the best leadership behavior towards any given situation within the organizational set up represents the leader’s real attitude towards change (Oladipo et al, 2013).

To this end, it is always important to assess leaders based on specific issues that they were faced with. Recently in media reports, allegations of student victimization at the School of Medical Sciences of the Stanford University came up. In the heat of media tussle, many were those who were calling for heads to roll without any thorough investigations but based on hearsay. While this hula balloon was going on, Mr. Singh went behind public confrontation to undertake secret investigations of his own staff.

Eventually, it was the findings of Mr. Singh that became the major decision tool that exposed all offenders. Clearly, the best of leaders have been described as those who are not quick to be seen in the public domain but would sit back and put their skills, knowledge and logic to work to achieve results (Goleman, 2000). Indeed, even though his action may be generally considered as authoritarian; because it did not directly involve other people, the dean implemented this action perfectly and to the best of the challenge that he was faced at the time.

Ineffectiveness of Leadership Still on the practice of the authoritarian leadership style, the story of Lillian Park can be told as an example of how ineffectively this leadership style was used. This is because in recent media reportage, a group of workers at the company went on a protest against their management for various reasons of poor conditions of work. As soon as this became known to the human resource manager, she single handedly took a decision to have all workers involved in the protest out of her working staff.

This was done without any prior notification of the board of directors of the company. Eventually after her action was rolled out, the group of aggrieved workers consulted a public attorney, who took up the issue in court. After days of legal battle, it turned out that the human resource manager was wrong in her action as she did not follow due process and at the same time denied the workers of their benefits. A fine as huge as $1.5 million was leveled against the company. As noted in literature, leaders must see themselves as chief servants, who are tasked with the responsibility of getting the collective goal of the