My Interpretation on leadership Theories

Leaders need to train their eyes to spot opportunities and their hands to seize it. I picked this image because it defines in my mind the way I see leadership theories. It is  ways of thinking that have to be developed for a person to become a great leader. Just like this painting where the different images develop after seeing the overall picture in different ways.  

Relating to the Theories

After doing the midterm and learning about all these great theories, I now try to apply them to my own everyday life. When doing something at work or school, I always stop and kind of reflect back on each of the major theories we talked about and see if they apply to me. In this class each one of us wants to be a type of leader and have our followers, employees be able to apply some of these theories to us so we can realize just how a class about “leadership” has impacted our leadership abilities.  Looking just at the seven major leadership theories we talked about on our midterm I can say “ oh I want  path/ goal theory to represent the way I will be interacting with my followers,” but after being in this class now half of the semester, one thing I have learned is that’s not how these theories work. Yes some of them you can try to consciously implement in the way you lead your followers but mostly many of the leadership theories come subconsciously to leaders without them even realizing they are doing it. One entity I can say I have taken away from the movie, Mona Lisa Smile is just that, seeing that leadership theories come subconsciously and sometimes, its moments in our life that bring them out. Like many characters in the movie, many of them didn’t see themselves as leaders except, maybe Betty but because of periods in their life they became leaders all in their own ways.

My Explanation on Theory

While doing my midterm I realized just how many different leadership theories there are.  After watching Mona Lisa Smile, I understood in a better way these theories and how in a way there can be a leader in each person, depending on the situation. In my midterm I tried to use all the different characters from the movie because they all amazed me, when I saw a different leader theory in each one of them. Not only did I see different leadership theories in each situation through the movie and each character developing leadership skills as the movie continued but also received a better understanding of how each theory impacts a person.  During the class when Professor Sipe  tried to explain theories like transformational leadership or leader/ member exchange theory on the bored I would be a little confused and had to go over the material a few times to understand it. With this midterm on the other hand, through movies, something I believe is the easiest way for our generation to understand things, was a perfect way to have a midterm. Without characters like Joan or Connie,  I would have never understood the theories as well as I did if not for the movie showing me visual examples that can occur in real life. My thinking of leadership theory has evolved a great deal since the beginning of the class. When I first found out that this class was going to be on leadership theories, I thought “how can they make a semester about something like leadership theories when it can be summed up in one class session.” Now I feel like I didn’t know a thing about leadership theories or how deeply they impact the way a person can grow as a leader, and by understanding these theories more profoundly, I see a person can understand themselves in a whole new way, not just as a leader.After learning more about leadership theories, I have learned just how many different theories there are.  For example just for the midterm we used seven different theories; Trait based theories, skills and competencies theories, situational leadership, transformational leadership, behavior based theory, leader /member exchange theory, path/goal theory and there are hundreds of more we haven’t even touched on.

My Midterm

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Transformational Leadership in Action

James MacGregor Burns

James MacGregor Burns  was born in 1918 and is  an award-winning writer, a Pulitzer Prize winner and biographer who specializes in the study of leadership. He was the one to embark on a more philosophical approach to understanding and describing leadership, and coined the theory of "transformational leadership" – leadership that delivers true value, integrity, and trust. Burns showed a way to a general theory of leadership. He is best known for his contributions to the transformational, aspirational, and visionary schools of leadership theory. Burn’s Key novelty in leadership theory was shifting from the study of traits in a great leader and transactional management, to focus on the interactions of leaders and those they lead, as collaborators working toward a mutual benefit.

Blanchard Situational Leadership

Situational Leadership theory has many parts to show the different approaches a leader-follower situation has like Directive telling, coaching/selling, participating, and delegating. Looking at all these different approaches, I feel that my manager at the job I have now is very strong in the directive telling approach. She always says that she is up for any opinions and outside input when it comes to solving problems but at the end I always feel like she uses a directive telling approach when she needs something done. Many times she doesn’t even realize that this is the way she handles the situation with me but I believe it’s a natural way for her to distribute tasks to be done without really forming a type of relationship. I think for me as the receiver it hurts my feelings at times because as a boss she isn’t willing to listen to peoples feeling or opinions she is just in her own world where she needs this main task done so she directly tells you, the follower to complete it. On the other hand my assistant manager is very different in her approach. Even though she too assigns tasks to be done, the way she approaches it is , by a delegating way. When she asks you to complete a task, you can always feel that she asks you not commands for the task to be completed. I feel the assistant manager tries to form less task oriented relationships with her followers and more relationship oriented ones.

Contingency Theory Vs. Situational Leadership

The contingency Theory is when a leadership role is divided in two different orientations. There is a task orientation and relationship orientation. Task orientation is when a leader doesn’t really form a relationship with their followers but just has an assign, obey relationship. The leader assigns a task in a directive way and expects it to be completed by the follower without really forming a relationship with them beforehand. Also relationship based is when leaders and followers develop relationships based on social exchanges. Leader has to decide what to share with the follower because of time and resources limited on dyadic relationship. For example when I was seventeen, I worked in Forever 21 and my boss liked to have a tasked oriented relationship with her employees. Half of the time I worked there, she couldn’t even remember my name and referred to me as “you girl” when she needed to assign a task.  Fiedler’s situational leadership took the contingency theory into more depth by explaining more about the different parts of relationship orientation and task orientation like Directive telling approach, coaching/selling approach, participating and delegating. The coaching/selling approach and participating is part of the relationship orientation and the directive telling and delegating approach is part of the task orientation. When I used to work in a catering company my boss always knew if he wanted me to help him achieve a goal he would use the selling approach because I am a big believer in  “you have to give something to get something in return.”