Organizations as Political Systems

Don Clark’s leadership style survey assesses or evaluates the kind of leadership style of that an individual is inclined to implement once he takes on leadership or managerial roles within groups or organizations. Clark’s survey consists of thirty questions that will be rated according to the frequency of actions or behaviors identified in each number. The results of the survey will determine whether an individual’s leaderships style is authoritarian, participative, and delegative.

Looking back to the experience of taking the survey, answering the thirty questions, I already obtained some insights on my leadership style just by assessing how often I do the kinds of behaviors stated in the questions. Overall, the questions almost seemed to give away what the results of the survey were. The results of the survey revealed that my leadership style is participative. The next most dominant leadership style is delegative, as I have read that the description of the participative and the delegative styles are somewhat similar.

The least dominant leadership style that I implement is the authoritative style. Looking at my most dominant leadership style, the participative style allows the sharing of roles and responsibilities within the leader and subsidiaries. These roles and responsibilities are not delegated or ordered to anyone in particular but are shared by both the leader and members or employees of each unit or department within the organization. However, the leader still takes responsibility for the results or outcomes of shared work outputs or decisions.

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Moreover, the leader has the final say on how the unit or department will approach various problems or concerns within the organization. (Clark, 2008) The results of the leadership style survey is not surprising, not only as I have already obtained an idea on how I act or behave as a leader during taking the survey, but because I seem to agree or act similarly tot eh nature and characteristics stated by Clark about participative leaders.

I do believe that the accomplishment of tasks is a shared responsibility, and that the rate of success is highly influenced by how well the leader and members of a team or group is able to contribute individually by sharing their knowledge and skills. Perhaps the advantages or strengths of being a leader who is participative in nature is that the strengths and contributions of all individuals involved in the team are combined in order to produce the best results.

However, allowing or motivating these kinds of things to happen require good leadership skills that will be able to draw out the strengths or potency of each member of the team or the group. Perhaps my understanding of leadership fits that of the context of the organizational setting, such that leaders are the “captains of the ship” propelling the direction the organization is heading. The efficiency of leaders lie in their capacity to steer the organization to success in such a way that they are able to handle all aspects of the organization, most especially its human capital, to exhibit and produce the best results.

Quality leadership styles or approaches require severe training and discipline in order to determine one’s leadership skills and capabilities. I believe I can improve by leadership skills by being flexible to trends and changes introduced to the field of management, and by analyzing organizational situations in order to determine which type of leadership style or approach to implement fitting the context of the situation or environment.

Although the survey was instrumental in informing individuals about their leadership styles, it lacks the depth of providing suggestions or recommendations on how one’s leadership skills and competencies will be able to improve. Moreover, the strengths and weaknesses for each leadership style was missing, disregarding the need for individuals to understand the underlying meaning of the survey – and that is to comprehend the results of the survey in order to change one’s leadership styles and qualities to foster growth and development.

For this reason, there is a need to explore other possibilities of evaluating one’s leadership styles in order to ensure the validity and reliability of evaluation or assessment results and outcomes. References Clark, D. (2008). Leadership Styles. Retrieved December 9, 2008, from NWLink. Website: http://www. nwlink. com/~donclark/leader/leadstl. html

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