Leadership Theory

Reflection Paper #3—Leadership Theory

I would like to talk about Situational leadership that I learned from the presentation. Since Situational leadership shared the similarities with Contingency leadership theory (my group presented it), I was looking forward to it be presented. After what I’ve been told, the most difference to me was Situational leadership still focuses on a same leader with self-regulation to lead under diversities situations; whereas, contingency theory emphasizes different leaders should lead for different contexts. In my term, it is relations as one to many v.s. many to many.

However, they both emphasize on the uncertain various situations that only one type of leadership style will not work for a group or organizations. I like the idea of being elasticity and agility as a leader to face the situations. For my point of view, I think situational leadership approaches me more than the other one. It is more practical to an individual who has a great desire to train to be a leader. It sets forth a clear set of prescriptions for how a leader should act if he/she wants to enhance the leadership effectiveness. Nevertheless, Contingency leadership is more like a team-work theory to me that leadership will be transferred into one another under different circumstances.

Contingency leadership will only present obviously under particular settings such as the airplane crush in a desert or a very relation-closed group which each members respect, trust others and are willing to transfer their power to one another for the requirements of situations. In real life, for example a huge company, I think it will be too idealization that is difficult to operate. A well-organized company often divides employees into different ranks such as CEO, upper managers, middle managers, supervisors, senior workers, junior workers…etc. Therefore, one worker most likely reports his/her performance to the manager who takes in charge of him/her. That way, it is more realistic to manager to be trained to lead different characteristic subordinates than having so many managers to lead many workers under the same department due to the cost-effectiveness concerns as well as the real possibility occurs. It increases the negative influence to be chaos and confusion for a company. Therefore, I believe situational leadership approaches to most of the real-world organizations better and easier applied.