Role of Leaders and Followers in an Organization

This article discusses the roles of leaders and followers in an organization, their influence on each other, and the challenges of being a dual-role leader. It also highlights the critical elements of effective leadership and followership.

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ROLE OF LEADERS AND FOLLOWERS
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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.

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The dual-role situation is a scenario where a leader of a particular team reports to another
leader who is of a higher rank. This situation is common to all business unit leaders. By being the
marketing manager of Coca-Cola Company, I had the role of leading the marketing team and
following the directives of the general manager. The major issues associated with this dual-
situation are; delay in decision making at the top level of management thus affecting decision
making at the team level, I handled this issue by submitting team’s proposed strategies to the
general manager, so that the decision made at that level would align with team’s plan and also
having a contingency plan which my team will follow in case the proposed plan is rejected
(Padam 2009).
The second issue was the allocation of resources in which my department was allocated
less resources thus affecting the resources I will allocate to each of my team members (Van Wart
2014). I coped with this issue by preparing the department’s budget in good time and submitting
it to my senior so as to ensure that the resource requirements of my department are put into
consideration.
Being both a leader and a follower taught me critical elements such as; for the objectives
of an organization to be achieved, there must be a positive relationship between leaders and
followers (Northouse 2015). Secondly, decisions made at every level of management should
incorporate the interest of the followers since they are the implementers (Padam 2009). The third
element is that effective communication plays a major role in ensuring that plans and directions
to be followed are properly understood by all the parties involved.

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References
Nohria, N. and Khurana, R. eds., 2010. Handbook of leadership theory and practice. Harvard
Business Press
BIBLIOGRAPHY Northouse, P. G., 2015. Leadership Theory and Practice. 7 ed: SAGE Publications.
Padam, S., 2009. Leadership: Theory and Practice. South Asian Journal of Management, 16(3),
p.136.
Van Wart, M., 2014. Dynamics of leadership in public service: Theory and practice. Routledge.