Leadership Styles

Leadership styles tend to vary in different organizational structure, people, situation and assigned task; however, traditional role of a leader as a supervisor or a decision-maker has been transforming. The idea of new leadership traits such as teamwork, communication, and trust are also prevalent in the industry now. Generally, the most common and widely used leadership styles today include dominant leadership, relationship-oriented leadership, task-oriented leadership, and transactional and transformational leadership. With all the various leadership styles available, there should always be one identified style appropriate and applicable to each and every industry, especially in professional business fields like Accounting. Accounting is a process of recording and reporting each business-related transaction, and allows a company to analyze financial performance of the business as well as look at identified statistics pertinent to operational performance. With the effort to ensure clear, comprehensive, and reliable economic information, accounting goal is indeed vulnerable to conflicts and other related issues associated with financial handling and documentation. As a result, leadership that will best suit the accounting operations should be transactional and transformational leadership style.

True enough that accounting is more of the traditional compliance with the generally accepted accounting policies, but it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t require proactive and motivational management. It requires transactional styles as we are bound to ensure that we comply with policies, but meanwhile it also requires transformational style as we are bound to be flexible to change and work with others. Transactional style should also be prevalent as it requires rewards which increase the likelihood that a good behavior will continue. Accounting managers must ensure that appropriate consequences occur as a rule of employee’s behavior. In the midst of formulating financial documentation and reporting, it is necessary to ensure less discrepancies, questioning, and conflicts especially when all members have to work in groups