Role of Leaders and Followers in an Organization

Leaders and Followers 1
ROLE OF LEADERS AND FOLLOWERS
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Leaders and Followers 2
Leaders play major roles in an organization, which according to Padam (2009), includes;
setting the organization’s vision, long-term goals, short-term goals, and individual goals, training
the followers on how to execute their duties, solving the team’s problems, guiding followers on
the path to follow in order to achieve desired goals, providing the followers with the resources
needed to work efficiently, foreseeing and controlling risks proactively, assessing the
environment in order to determine the most appropriate cause of action, and allocating duties to
followers among other roles.
The roles of the followers in an organization according to Nohria and Khurana (2010),
includes; achieving the targets given to them by the leaders, supporting the leaders in achieving
organizational objectives, executing the duties assigned to them with utmost prudence and
responsibility, notifying the leader of any problem within the team, embracing teamwork and
cohesion, safeguarding the resources allocated to them and the team’s secrets such as product
formula, and following directives that are given to them by the leaders, among others.
Leaders influence the followers by motivating them in order to increase their morale, thus
resulting to increased productivity, discovering and nurturing the talents and abilities of
followers (Northouse 2015), removing or minimizing obstacles that may thwart the followers
from achieving their goals thus making work easy for them, and creating cohesion in the team in
order to encourage followers to work together. Followers on the other hand influence leaders by
contributing to decision making in order to result in more qualitative decisions (Northouse 2015),
working with minimal supervision thus making it easy for the leader to execute the leadership
roles.