LEADERSHIP EFFECTIVENESS
Our personality has a lot of impacts on our lives; it is responsible for how we interact with each other, and how we interact with our families and friend. The five traits of personality are essential in helping us understand how personality makes one an effective leader. Personality plays a vital role in our life. It acts as our automatic drive in situations. The five traits are; Dependability, which depends on one's ability to show responsibility. Agreeableness, which is one's capacity to show sympathy. Intellectance, one's capacity to be open-minded. Surgency, which is the capability to be social with others and emotional stability, which is the leader's ability to stay calm when put under pressure (Pendleton & Furnham, 2012).
Surgency is defined by talkativeness and assertiveness. It is also referred to as extraversion and leaders with this personality like to be in charge and being responsible for others, and eventually they make effective leaders. Leaders who score high on the agreeableness are warm and easy to approach while leaders who score low on this dimension are cold and distant. For a leader to be effective, they have to score high on the agreeableness dimension. For a leader to be effective, they ought to have high emotional stability such that they display a high degree of being calm and adjusted (Pendleton & Furnham, 2012). For a leader to be effective, they have to be open-minded and imaginative, this means that they have to score high on the intellectance dimension. Personality plays a huge role in determining the effectiveness of a leader.
Preferences have an enormous impact on leadership effectiveness. Individuals with a preference for extraversion are energized by interacting with others and love to work in groups rather than work alone and are easily approachable while introverts take time to think things through. Individuals with a preference for sensing always prefer to take in the details of the information that is real and tangible. They are very observant and tend to take in every little aspect of their environment. Individuals with a preference for intuition tend to look at the bigger picture and asses information from a certain point of view. Intuitive individuals think and process multiple ideas (Alkahtani, Ismael, Mohamed, & Davoud, 2011). Individuals with a thinking preference tent to always consider the logical consequences of a decision before they take action. They are always energized when it comes to logical arguments while individuals with the thinking preference tend to consider what is important for others, they place themselves in situations so that they can identify others and make a decision based on honoring the values and beliefs of others while individuals with the judging preference love to approach things in a planned way. These individuals tend to be organized. Individuals with a perceiving preference are very flexible they are always going for last-minute options. All these preferences have a significant impact on how effective a leader will be.
Motivation is the extent to which much effort is directed towards achieving a particular set goal. Motivation has four aspects. Efforts, which an individual may apply tremendous energy that helps achieve a set goal. Persistence is the second aspect of motivation, this is the willingness to accomplish a task or achieve a set goal. The other aspect of motivation is direction, which is the efforts that are directed towards achieving the set goals. The last aspect of motivation is goals, individual, and organizational goals (Nader, 2019). Motivation plays an important role in determining how effective a leader will be, an effective leader should be able to motivate those who fall under his leadership. A leader should seek out and know what motivates his employees.
Leadership styles are also responsible for impacting a leader's effectiveness. Leadership styles impact the organization by affecting the morale of employees and the decision making of leaders. An effective leader should be careful when it comes to analyzing problems, assessing the skills of their employees, and being able to make careful, informed choices (Duggan, n.d.). It is only through choosing the most appropriate leadership style for the situation that an effective leader provides a long-lasting solution.
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a tool that helps identify one's personality and preferences. The tool is made up of self-inventory questionnaire. According to this tool, there are four areas of personality that affect one's ability to learn. The results of this tool are in four dimensions, namely; Extraversion and introversion, based on how one directs their energy. Sensing and intuition based on how one processes certain information. Thinking and feeling, based on how one makes judgments. Judging and perceiving, this is based on one's organizational preferences (Gordon, 2000). From this tool, one can be a perceiver, judger, feeler, thinker, intuitor, sensor, introvert, or extravert. This tool is effective, and the preferences can be combined.
As a leader and as a subordinate, I prefer the democratic leadership style where decision making involves the leader and the employees. The leader values the efforts of his/her team of subordinates, criticism, and praise are given objectively and a sense of responsibility is developed in the group (Khan, Khan, Qureshi, Ismail, Rauf, Latif & Tahir, 2015). From my personal experience, this leadership style has its pros and cons. The first advantage of this style is that it helps solve complex issues, this style encourages the development of a creative environment, and it also helped encourage connectivity between team members. The disadvantages of this style include; it is regretful at times when every member of the team thinks that their input has to be implemented and as a leader I spent a lot of time apologizing to individuals whose idea was not implemented and processing decision at times tends to take a lot of time, and this slows down implementation of some input (Miller, 2017).
Being an effective leader means I have the ability to influence and motivate others to work well. As a leader, I am responsible for creating a vision and the duty to motivate others to pursue this vision. My personality greatly defines how I fit into a leadership style. My personality as an extraversion and conscientiousness puts me in a good position to be an effective leader. The leadership style I use also impacts my leadership a lot (Bertsch, Nguyen, Alford, Baran, Reynen, Saeed & Ondracek, 2017). To achieve higher effectiveness as a leader, the democratic leadership style can be improved through taking some of the control back from the subordinates the control will be taken from an area that has the chance to improve the business (Bianca, n.d). Lastly, this style can be improved by taking charge of opening another business location and develop a new product while the team of subordinates handles the existing operations.
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Reference List
Alkahtani, H. A., Ismael, A., & Mohamed, S., and Davoud, N., 2011. The impact of personality and leadership styles on leading change capability of Malaysian managers. Australian Journal of Business and Management Research. 1. 70-99.
Bertsch, A., Nguyen, H.T.H., Alford, A., Baran, W., Reynen, J., Saeed, M. and Ondracek, J., 2017. Exploring the relationship between personality and preferred leadership. Journal of Leadership, Accountability, and Ethics, 14(1), pp.32-45.
Bianca, A., n.d. Three ways to Improve leadership styles. Retrieved from; https://yourbusiness.azcentral.com/3-ways-improve-leadership-style-3522.html
Duggan, T., n.d. The Effects of Leadership Styles on the Organization. Retrieved from; https://yourbusiness.azcentral.com/effects-leadership-styles-organization-5247.html
Gordon, H.R., 2000. Myers Briggs Type Indicator Personality Characteristics of Beginning Trade and Industrial and Health Occupations Education Secondary Teachers. Journal of Health Occupations Education, 14(1), p.6.
Khan, M.S., Khan, I., Qureshi, Q.A., Ismail, H.M., Rauf, H., Latif, A. and Tahir, M., 2015. The styles of leadership: A critical review. Public Policy and Administration Research, 5(3), pp.87-92.
Miller, O., 2017. 8 Pros and Cons of the Democratic Leadership Style. Retrieved from; https://medium.com/democraticleadership/8-pros-and-cons-of-the-democratic-leadership-style-5b668f070c1b
Nader, R., 2019. Leadership and motivation (Doctoral dissertation).
Pendleton, D. and Furnham, A., 2012. The impact of personality on leadership. In Leadership: All You Need To Know (pp. 135-154). Palgrave Macmillan, London.
