Remember the Titans (2000)
What does this statement mean to you – “Attitude reflects leadership?” Explain your answer!
ANSWER: “Attitude reflects leadership,” in the movie “Remember the Titans” (Yakin), mean that dispositional beliefs, values, and feelings of players was dictated by their leader’s own attitude. In the directive (task) dimension of leadership, a leader helps his team players achieve their goal through one-way communication using motivational speech, for instance. Examples include giving direction, defining goals, attaining a goal, and evaluating an outcome. In the supportive (relationship) dimension of leadership, a leader assists his members by means of two-way communication to feel comfortable among themselves. In the effective dimension of leadership, a leader exerts influence on his players to perform at their best. All aspects of leadership were outstandingly portrayed by African American Coach Boone as he helped his racially diverse team overcome misunderstanding and distrust to him.
Who were the leaders in this movie and why did you pick them? What type of leader was he/she (task, social-emotional or transformational)? Explain your answer!
ANSWER: The leaders in the film were the Black High School Football Coach Herman Boone (played by Denzel Washington), White Captain Gerry Bertier (played by Ryan Hurst), and Black Player Julius Campbell (played by Wood Harris) who represented his team members. I picked them up because of the way they performed their role in achieving team integration later on in the movie. For me, the Coach Boone possessed all types of leader because of his task-orientedness, social-emotional prowess, and transformational competence. In the case of the Captain Bertier, he was a task-oriented leader while Campbell was a socio-emotional or relational leader. Afterwards, they all learned to be integrative leaders in their own right because of how the team succeeded in winning the highly prized game.
Who were the followers in this movie and why did you pick them? What followership characteristics did he/she portray? What type of follower (conformist, passive, alienated, pragmatic, or exemplary) was he/she? Explain your answer!
ANSWER: I considered all the team players as followers in the film. I picked them up because they were all subordinate to Coach Boone. Although they have Boone, all the group members were followers or subordinates (that is, originally task-oriented individuals) to him. Primarily, I have chosen the Bertier and Campbell, respectively, as the main followers to Boone. The followership characteristics that they portrayed were initially purely task-oriented and less of a relational-oriented because of the racial conflict among their White and Black teammates. For me, the captain was a nonconformist follower given his color as a White individual to his Black co-players; whereas, the Black player was a nonconformist too to the White captain because of the way White co-players made him (including Black team members) made him (them) feel inferior. It was the integrative skill and power of Coach Boone that weld both sides to reconsider harmonious relationship not due to the color of their skin.
Define the situation(s) in the movie? Explain your answer(s)?
ANSWER: The situation in the movie was the need to integrate people of diverse colors (White and Black football players). White and Black people of America, in the years 1970s and below the movie was filmed, have problems of integration due to their respective colors. Whites view themselves more supreme than their Black counterpart. With football, disregarding differences and finding what is uniquely the characteristics of both colors was the appropriate way of handling racial segregation. Hence, at the end of the movie, effective leadership was portrayed well, as well as, its harmonizing effect on racially divided team players. All the team members and coach later on showed the power needed for task-orientedness and relational-orientedness, not to mention leadership effectiveness. In conclusion, Remember the Titans movie helped me understand more leadership in action where sports leadership is more on just the title (such as being a football coach) because it takes positive attitude and good values to produce remarkable change of a previously divided team into a converged one.
Works Cited
Reddin, William James. Managerial Effectiveness. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970. Print.
Remember the Titans. Dir. Boaz Yakin. Perf. Denzel Washington, et al. 2000. Web.
