KMGT 633 - Leadership Response: Traits, Styles, and Application

This essay provides a leadership response based on personal experience within an automobile organization, contrasting the roles of a follower and a leader. It discusses various leadership styles, including transactional and transformational leadership, and their impact on team motivation and performance. The author reflects on their experience as a marketing team leader, transitioning from being motivated by a transactional leader using reward and punishment to adopting a transformational style focused on intellectual stimulation and employee growth. The essay also touches upon the importance of situational leadership and the development of communication and negotiation skills for effective leadership. The student document is available on Desklib, a platform offering a wide array of study tools and solved assignments for students.

Running head: LEADERSHIP RESPONSE
LEADERSHIP RESPONSE
name of the student:
name of University:
Author's note:

1LEADERSHIP RESPONSE
The leadership traits vary from leader to leader due to the ambience, expectation and
the nature of the task performed. The role of leadership mainly depends on the traits or the
psychology of the leaders. Some are enthusiastic, some are dominating (Lisak et al. 2016).
These traits of the leaders depend upon numerous factors like emotional stability,
contentiousness. social boldness, self-assurance and tough mindedness. Beyond these basic
traits, some of the leaders possess some traits which differentiate them from the others and
grab the attention of the followers. Rapid changes in the present world expect the leaders to
cope up so that they can effectively motivate the subordinates through their thoughts as well
as actions. The variety of leadership styles include Authoritarian, Paternalistic, Democratic,
Laissez-faire, Transactional and Transformational.
For my personal experience, I also had served a team of an automobile organization. I
was elected as the leader of the marketing team where I was a follower on a special project
beforehand. In this context I have experienced the leadership style both as a follower as well
as the leader. As a follower I used to think that being leader is an in born talent and the
leaders needed to have leadership capacities within them naturally. My leader was a
transactional leader who kept us motivated through the system of either punishment or
reward. One most important aspect of leadership being influencing capacity, my leader
initiated corrective measures to improve our performance (Latham 2014). This leader as
followed the transactional style, used to focus on increasing the efficiency of the established
procedures and routines. Hence the main concern of the followers was on following the
existing rules rather than making any changes in the operation or the strategy of the team.
On the basis of my performance in the team I was elected as the leader of that team.
This process initially was more interesting to me as I knew the weaknesses as well as strength
of the team (Landis, Hill and Harvey 2014). I thought, I could easily motive the employees
working under me because I already identified the needed changes in my team so that I do

2LEADERSHIP RESPONSE
not only depend on the motivate based on punishment and reward. In operating as a leader, I
followed the transformational style of leadership. I took measures to understand the
perceptions of the followers and redirect their thoughts. I preferred to improve the situation
by challenging the employees so that they do not need motivation from the leaders rather feel
intellectual stimulation to grow their self-confident. However, my style of leadership was
highly dependent of the situation. In that case I had to act like a situational leader where I was
responsible to grow performance of the marketing team. Hence, I was ready to take any type
of risk and use unusual strategies to stimulate my followers (Kennedy and Chen 2015). As a
leader I want to develop my communication and negotiation skills so that I can convey my
thoughts to my subordinates and improve any situation.

3LEADERSHIP RESPONSE
References:
Kennedy, G. and Chen, H., 2015. Practical Tips for Developing Leadership Skills Early in a
Career. In Leadership in Surgery (pp. 91-98). Springer International Publishing.
Landis, E.A., Hill, D. and Harvey, M.R., 2014. A synthesis of leadership theories and
styles. Journal of Management Policy and Practice, 15(2), p.97.
Latham, J.R., 2014. Leadership for quality and innovation: Challenges, theories, and a
framework for future research. Quality Management Journal, 21(1), pp.11-15.
Lisak, A., Erez, M., Sui, Y. and Lee, C., 2016. The positive role of global leaders in
enhancing multicultural team innovation. Journal of International Business Studies, 47(6),
pp.655-673.