Managing Millennials: A Critical Analysis of Leadership Styles

This essay provides a comprehensive overview of leadership and various leadership styles, emphasizing their application in managing the millennial generation. It critically analyzes styles such as laissez-faire, servant, coaching, transactional, democratic, autocratic, and transformational leadership, assessing their effectiveness in motivating and guiding millennial employees. The report highlights the importance of adapting leadership approaches to meet the unique needs and expectations of this generation, which values career growth, job satisfaction, and recognition. Recommendations include fostering a strong working culture, providing regular feedback, offering mentorship, and creating challenging opportunities to enhance millennial engagement and productivity. The analysis underscores the need for leaders to build trust, promote open communication, and appreciate individual contributions to foster a positive and productive work environment.

ESSAY

TABLE OF CONTENT
INTRODUCTION ..........................................................................................................................3
MAIN BODY...................................................................................................................................3
Critical analysis of leadership styles which are adopted to manage millennial generation.........3
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................7
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................8

INTRODUCTION
Leadership is an art of motivating individuals and group of individuals to work together
and achieve organizational goal. Leadership helps in achieving and setting objective, track the
competition and solving problems quickly. It provides direction to employees and company (Al
Khajeh., 2018). With a good leadership and management organizations can easily achieve their
objective on time and with optimum utilization of resources. Leadership style is used for
providing direction, motivate people and implementing plan, there are many leadership styles
such as autocratic, democratic, laissez-faire, coaching, employee production orientation,
participative etc. Millennial generation means individuals who were born in last two decades of
20th century, this generation is also known as Gen Y or generation Y. This report will highlight
the concept of leadership and leadership styles and also includes a style which is adopted to
manage millennial generation. This report also involve the critical analysis of leadership style
which is adopted by organization and with some recommendation.
MAIN BODY
Critical analysis of leadership styles which are adopted to manage millennial generation
Leadership is a capability of individual to guide and influence other people or group of
people of an organization. A good leader understand basic needs of the followers such as hope,
compassion, trust and stability. The main role of leaders is to have clear objective or goal,
motivate and give direction to their followers and support their members in order to get success.
Leadership styles are leader's technique of providing right path, implementing plans and inspire
and motivate employees. There are different leadership styles which are used in an organization
like laissez-faire, affiliation, autocratic, coaching, democratic, situational, transaction and
transformational leadership (Al-Malki, and Juan., 2018) . An effective leader has qualities like
communication, gratitude, vision, accountability, self-aware, flexibility, dependability , critical
thinking and have abilities to influence other etc. effective leader has courage, personality and
have clear vision along with ambition to success. Leadership helps in grow and motivating

employees which lead as a business expansion. They make loyal customers and good brand
image which attract new customers and also provide good workplace for employees by giving a
clear vision and way to achieve that. A leader focuses on inspiring and motivating other to
enhance employees productivity which give positive impact on company. Some leadership styles
are as follows:
Laissez-faire leadership: In this style leaders have attitude of reliance and trust on their
employees. This styles gives opportunities to employees that they use their resources, experience
and creativity which help leaders to meet team goals. There is little influence from leaders
because they give employee opportunities to handle, take decision and only leaders take action if
needed and take full responsibility of overall decision and actions. This leadership style help in
retaining employees because they feel confidence in workplace, good accountability and make
creative environment, also employees feel motivated which help organization to grow (Ciulla.,
2020). This style has some disadvantages like it create difficult for new comers, lack of structure,
have problem for groups because it is individual based leadership styles etc.
Servant leadership: In servant leadership style they focus on communities to which they be and
well-being of others, here goal of leader is to serve. In this, leaders first serve their team
members which not only beneficial for producing quality outcomes but also give good impact on
employee’s professional growth (Gandolfi, and Stone., 2018). This style motivate greater
responsibility and ownership, growth of internal staff, create future leaders, employees feel
appreciated and valued in the working environment and also encourages creativity, innovation,
curiosity etc. but it has some cons such as for leaders it is time-consuming style, difficult to
communicate etc.
Couching leadership: Leaders gives direction to the employee which help them in utilizing and
developing their abilities to get potential in achieve objective. They concentrate on brining out
best in their team by inspiring and guiding them to achieve objective. Leaders develop and
manage talent, set objective and give feedbacks to employees for enhancing their performance.
This style encourages collaboration and communication, helps individuals to improve skills, so
they can perform in effective way and also easily identify weakness and convert that weakness
into strength, which help company to grow talent and develop highly skilled staff.
Analysis of leadership styles which can be adapted to manage millennial generation

Millennial generation want attention as individual not as a group, they are more focused on
career and job satisfaction, and they want a leader who guide and motivated them.
Transaction leadership style: It is use for transaction between followers and their leader in form
of punishment, rewards, and any other exchange to get job done. For millennial generation this
style is suitable for manage them because as they believe in “give and take” so in this leadership
style leader set a clear objective and all team members know how they will be rewarded after
completing tasks and employees have opportunity to choose reward system. This style also
create effective chain of command because it's minimizes and eliminate confusion. By the
rewards' system employee feel motivated which result in improve productivity and have great
impact on organization culture. In this style leader create measurable, time-bound and specific
objective which are achievable so employee can achieve easily.
Democratic leadership styles: This style is also known as participative leadership style in this,
members also take part in decision-making process. In this every individual have opportunity to
take part in decision, share their ideas and knowledge and have free flow of information, focus
on group equality so every member have equal chance to share and take part in organization
activity (Akpoviroro, and et.al., 2018). Millennial generation is want this type of environment
where they can easily share there problems and ideas and this lead better contribution of them in
business operation which increase morale and improve productivity. By this style organization
get more creative ideas and solution so new staff also have chance to give their opinion and share
their ideas.
Autocratic leadership style: In this leaders take all the decision by himself, they set plan for
action, objectives, process, rewards system etc. in these leaders are viewed as bossy (Chukwusa.,
2018). Some benefits of this style are: fast decision-making, better communication between
employees because in this information passes from one person to another so, it eliminates the
problem of multi-pal and complex channels of communication. Reduce employee stress because
employees are responsible only for meeting deadlines and follow instruction of the leader. Quick
decision-making and fast information share helps in enhance team productivity.
Transformational leadership style: In this style leader inspire and motivate their employees or
followers with empowers and a clear vision, encourage them to achieve their goals (Asbari.,
2020). Here leaders are seen as a role model, millennial are willing to speak so in
communicative work culture have great impact on them. For example, this generation know

there are many new methods for marketing and selling products, so they share their ideas which
may help organization in increasing sales. This leadership style place good values on
relationship, employees have high morale to work and experiences, and have low staff turnover
rate.
For growing company manager should adopt new leadership style, because if an
organization use same style from years to years which is not appropriate for new generation staff
as well as organization (Alqatawenh., 2018). Some essential points which is needed in leadership
like trust between team members, feedback and strong communication for expansion of
company.

Recommendation
For managing millennial, company should have strong working culture, so they feel free
to communicate and work in good environment where people help each other. This generation
was lead up with the highest perfection of achieving things, so they get what they want. This
generation crave recognition by this they feel motivated, and they don't want awards but a simple
appreciate for their handwork can boost their morel to work and commitment to the job so
company should focus on this. Company also focus on collaboration for this organization arrange
meetings and brainstorming sections for encourage collaboration. There are many way by which
organization prepares millennial for their leadership roles such as:
 Give them regular feedbacks, so they improve themselves accordingly
 Provide proper training, so they easily understand work which give them confidence and
knowledge
 Offer mentorship, so they are more focus and learning by doing is the best practices for
improvement
 Challenge them, this generation is more focus on smart work insist of hard work so by
challenging them will improve there productivity
CONCLUSION
This report gives a brief about leadership and leadership styles which provide clear
purpose and direction to employees, improve their critical thinking, time management and
leaders are well organized and help team members, motivate them to achieve objective. This
report also illustrated different leadership styles like autocratic leadership, transaction leadership,
servant leadership, couching leadership, laissez-faire leadership, transformational leadership,
democratic leadership etc. Moreover, also discus which leadership style was adapted to manage
millennial generation because this generation want good working environment and appreciation
of their work.

REFERENCES
Books and Journals
Akpoviroro, and et.al., 2018. Effect of participative leadership style on employee’s
productivity. International Journal of Economic Behavior (IJEB). 8(1). pp.47-60.
Al Khajeh, E.H., 2018. Impact of leadership styles on organizational performance. Journal of
Human Resources Management Research, 2018. pp.1-10.
Al-Malki, M. and Juan, W., 2018. Leadership styles and job performance: A literature
review. Journal of International Business Research and Marketing. 3(3). pp.40-49.
Alqatawenh, A.S., 2018. Transformational leadership style and its relationship with change
management. Verslas: teorija ir praktika. 19(1). pp.17-24.
Asbari, M., 2020. Is Transformational Leadership Suitable for Future Organizational
Needs?. International Journal of Social, Policy and Law. 1(1). pp.51-55.
Chukwusa, J., 2018. Autocratic leadership style: Obstacle to success in academic
libraries. Library Philosophy and Practice. p.1.
Ciulla, J.B., 2020. The importance of leadership in shaping business values. In The search for
ethics in leadership, business, and beyond (pp. 153-163). Springer, Cham.
Gandolfi, F. and Stone, S., 2018. Leadership, leadership styles, and servant leadership. Journal
of Management Research. 18(4). pp.261-269.