Strategic Leadership: Teams, Groups, and Development

This report provides a comprehensive overview of strategic leadership, focusing on its application within organizational contexts. It begins by defining the role of a leader in overcoming market barriers and inspiring subordinates to achieve a shared vision. The report then explores the importance of teams in enhancing organizational performance, highlighting benefits such as group support, goal fulfillment, diversity, collective strength, problem-solving capabilities, effective communication, and increased workflow speed. Different leadership styles are examined, including autocratic, democratic, laissez-faire, and paternalistic approaches, along with a comparison of work groups and teams. The impact of leadership on both work groups and teams is analyzed, and the report further delves into the distinction between formal and informal groups within an organization and society. The report also examines Tuckman's stages of team development (forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning) and discusses the role of leadership in guiding teams through these stages. The conclusion emphasizes the dynamic nature of effective leadership and its dependency on the leader's participation in the team's development.

STRATEGIC
LEADERSHIP
Name of Student
Name of University

Introduction
 In an organisational context, a leader is the individuals who are in charge of developing the
strategies that are required to overcome the market barriers and competition (Mahembe and
Engelbrecht 2014).
 Leaders inspire vision to the subordinates
 Motivate the subordinates for the fulfilment of the vision
 Execute the strategy for fulfilling the vision
 Effectively builds a team for effectively fulfilling the vision and gain organisational productivity.
 Leaders individually differ in the style or approach of doing what is necessary.
 Mahembe and Engelbrecht (2014) indicated the styles are democratic, autocratic, supportive,
charismatic and transformational depending on the nature of the individual.

Importance of teams in
organisational performance
 Group support: The members of the team support each other in
performing task requirements to fulfil short and long-term
objectives (Katzenbach and Smith 2015).
 Goals fulfilment: The fulfilment of the organisational objectives is
easier within a team as the distribution of work helps in the
completion of the tasks faster (Katzenbach and Smith 2015).

Importance of teams in
organisational performance
 Diversity: Chipulu et al. (2014)
showed cultural and ethnic
diversities improve the team
relationship and thereby
improving idea generation due to
its origin from different heritages.
 Collective strength: Individual
strength of the team members
compensate for the drawbacks to
overcome the obstacles for
fulfilling the objectives
(Mahembeand Engelbrecht 2014).
 Problem Solving: the team
members are able to solve
problems faster in comparison
individuals by generating unique
ideas in a short span of time.

Importance of teams in
organisational performance
 Communication: effective communication can be achieved
in teams, which in turn facilitates the transparency to
provide effective task completion (Katzenbach and Smith
2015).
 Workflow Speed: Teamwork cultivates cohesion within the
individual members and improves the decision-making
within the organisation (Katzenbach and Smith 2015).

Autocratic Team Leadership
 In this leadership style, the team members feel dominated by
their leader.
 The orders, assign tasks and duties without consultation, and this
negatively influences the bonding within the team (De Hoogh et
al. 2015).
 The creative decision making is also hampered with this form of
leadership and might give rise to conflict within the team

Democratic or Participative
Team Leadership
 Leaders who prefer participative of democratic approach
usually decentralise the authority within the team.
 This improves the relationship between the team members,
along with the leader itself (Cunningham et al. 2015).
 This form of leadership is cultivated good teamwork and
effectively overcomes the organisational objectives.

Laissez-Faire Team Leadership
 The leaders in this category do not prefer to rely on the
responsibility and power attainment, which is reflected in the
activities of the members.
 The leader, in this case, relies on the capability of the members
to complete the organisational objectives (Skogstad et al. 2015).

Paternalistic Team Leadership
 In this leadership
style, the leaders take
the role of the guide
and protector of the
team members (Chen
et al. 2015).
 The leader takes care
of the needs of the
team members, and
there is a sense of
gratitude within
members.

Difference between Work
Groups and Teams
Work Group Team
Only individuals are accountable All members are collectively
accountable
Concern for individual goal fulfilment Focus on fulfilling the team goals
Only come together for information
sharing
Frequently have meetings, and
discussions for planning and solving
problems
The produced is submitted individually Work is submitted collectively
Individual roles, tasks and
responsibilities are important
Even distribution of the
responsibilities, tasks and team roles
Leader individually controls the group Leader controls and monitors the

Impact of Leadership in
Workgroups
 The working groups within organisations are
positively directed towards specified goals
 The domain-specific tasks are usually done
individually by the workgroup members
 Leaders usually undertake a delgative approach
towards handling the individuals in the workgroup
(Folger et al. 2015)

Impact of Leadership in Teams
 Balance
 Trend analysis (Liu et al. 2015)
 Productivity improvement
 Diplomacy along with dictatorship
 Removal of self-importance