Reflective Essay on Leadership
Reflective Essay on Leadership
PART A
Introduction
One of the most widely researched aspects of personality and leadership in the big five factors of personality, which includes neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness and conscientiousness involve the ability to predict leaders. In fact, greater empirical support has been found for the five-factor model in predicting leaders than for the type indicators. However, research has additionally identified that for looking at appealing leaders, a proactive personality scale such as measuring the ability to change the organization's environment, to show initiatives and to persevere is a better predictor of leadership factor has relations with big five personality factors.
Underlying the ability to promote intellectual stimulation is the assumption that a transformational leader is a person who is himself/herself creative or perhaps more likely, is open and encourages others to express their creativity and originality. On the other hand, a situational leader is one who uses his personality and experience to get the best out of a situation, or, in other words, handle a situation in the best possible way. In this case, I suit best as a situational leader who is charismatic and influential. As an influential leader, I am also confident in my abilities and the willingness to explore and unknown. I am a person who is curious, cognitively flexible, and open. In line with this contention, openness to new experiences has been identified within personality psychology literature as one of the Big Five dimensions of personality (Gosling et al., 2005).
Openness to experience is strongly correlated with divergent thinking, with personality based measures of creativity. As summarized in a review by Mc Crae and Costa (1997), open people actively seek out experience and are not to be particularly reflective and thoughtful about ideas they encounter. They are not only able to grasp new ideas, but enjoy doing so. In reflection to this, I can say that I have the openness personality that fits in as an influential leader. However, from the low-score results from my assessment means that I need to improve on openness. I can do so effectively when I improve on my listening skills as well as seeking feedback on the process. This will keep me better positioned to give an appropriate response. Also, open people can be characterized by their in traditional attitudes, their rich and complex emotional lives and their behavioral flexibility. In fact, Jude and Bono (2000) have recently found an association between charismatic leadership and openness of experience, as measured using personality inventory as part of the Big Five personality construct.
The other major characteristic that attributes to charismatic/influential leaders is their ability to present a vision, future goals, or new direction, to demonstrate their enthusiasm for their vision and to inspire others to share the vision. This has been described at length in most of the biographic and studies on outstanding leaders. To demonstrate future orientation and formulate it regarding a vision that people can pursue with faith and enthusiasm, a person must be optimistic regarding positive expectations for the self, for others and society at large.
In other words, the leader must have a positive outlook on life. I bear such characteristics since I score highly on agreeableness as well as extraversion. Studies on optimism are relevant to understanding the approach taken and behavior of transformational leaders (Gosling, Rentfrow & Swann, 2003). Dispositional optimism was constructed as a generalized inclination to expect favorable life outcome and hold positive expectations for the future. Moreover, optimism has a high degree of interest in the life of satisfaction with fields of occupation and well-being.
Emotional Intelligence
Mayer, Salovey, Caruso, EI Test-(MSCEIT). The MSCEIT has an ability model of emotional intelligence and ensures for particular branches; of emotional intelligence; perceiving emotions, managing emotions, using emotions, understanding emotions (Mayer & Salovey, 1997). When people are inquired to make estimations on their cognitive ability or analytical intelligence, the answer they usually provide has no relations with the ability measure of intelligence.
The same is the case with emotional intelligence: a self-report measure of emotional intelligence or self-estimations of emotional intelligence does not highly correlate with the related measure emotional intelligence. While it can seem interesting and valuable to understand the self concept of people considering their abilities that relate to emotional intelligence, it is additionally valuable to be able to measure their actual abilities, especially leaders (Bar-On & Parker, 2000). MSCEIT relates to an ability-based measure of the construct. It has relation to the fourth branch hierarchical model o emotional intelligence with perceiving or recognizing management of emotions.
Perceiving emotions Identify the ability of a leaders to be in a position to recognize the way they feel about a particular issue as well as the people around him. My score on perceiving emotions is at a balance. It additionally includes perceived emotions in object, stories, art, music as well as other stimuli. Using emotions defines the generation ability of a leader to control emotions and then provide necessary reason with similar emotions generated. I also score highly on this. However, I need to improve on the balancing of perceiving and using emotions.
Understanding emotions: Considered the ability to understand complicated emotions and the way in which one can transition from one stage to the other. Managing emotions: this is considered the ability to open feelings and to modulate them in persons and on to others as well to enable the promotion of personal understanding and development. I have a good balance in these abilities as I have more control in understanding my emotions hence reacting to situations appropriately.
Each of the skills can enhance leader effectiveness, for instance, being in a position to perceive emotions in follower’s reactions. In a similar way, understanding person emotions increases self-awareness. Besides, as a leader I have the chance to form an emotional climate conducive to making decisions and providing maintenance for the morale of my followers. In any case, a leader who is in a position to regulate his or her emotions is better able to make effective use of coping strategies, in managing the moods of followers and charismatic. Even though the Caruso and Wolfe approach to emotional intelligence would seem to have great applicability to our discussion of leader development, there are various unresolved issues that relate to best conceptualized and measure emotional intelligence.
The significance of interpersonal proficiency has long been noted in the leadership literature. Interpersonal skills are required to understand and analyze social interrelationships among followers to better understand their needs. Leadership also requires interpersonal skills to be able to manage emotional displays to elicit strong affective attachment and performance from followers. Impression management, emotional regulation and the ability to discern others emotions have been suggested as important leadership skills. Together, these types of skills have been referred to as emotional intelligence.
Competency assessment
Competency assessment instrument or a competency product matrix to determine the competency profile that today’s and tomorrow’s leaders must ensure. Competency assessments have long been used in industry for workforce planning, employee recruitment, and compensation planning (Scalese et al., 2008). Increasingly, they are being used for various large gauge strategic reasons including market repositioning, organizational restructuring, job redesign and long-term leadership. They provide a means to profile and inventory existing skills and identifying potential skill gaps, thus assisting new skills they must either recruit or develop.
Such tools provide a means for focusing on organizations attention on identifying the core competencies essential to an organization's future viability. It does little good to implement a leadership assessment or competency assessment unless it is an enterprise-wide exercise. The downs side of such an undertaking is that it can take the time to recognize strong existing leadership competencies as well as skills and knowledge gaps. You will probably have to mediate conflicts among different corporate divisions or groups and deal with dueling political agenda around what are often considered essential leadership techniques for the future.
Especially competency assessment is based on two specific components; the evaluation tool as well as the evaluation method. The characteristics of the assessment valuation tool have to adjust authenticity including revenant concepts of the construct of interest, validity including face and sensibility (Kuhnert & Lewis, 1987). Leadership effectiveness is mediated by the use of various technical or functional knowledge as well as skills, intellectual, cognitive analytical capabilities, attitudes, motives, values, interposed behavior and personal characteristics.
Particularly, effective leadership typically requires proficiency in the form in as well as keeping firm interposed relationships (Kuhnert & Lewis, 1987). Even though some of the characteristics related to leadership tend to involve innate traits, such as charisma and various other aptitudes, most leadership practices involve acquired abilities such as business acumen involving accounting, finance, operational management and quantitative measures. Most leaders can think of only one consequence for individuals who do not complete their competencies. But there are many choices because there are various situations and people respond in various ways to the competency process, managers need many different responses.
Based on the assessment, I can state that I am competent as a leader who has the ability to make things work. I always try my best to accomplish all tasks that I embark on every day. I also put my entire focus in the process to accomplish my tasks. Also, I accommodate with people in a good manner. In the case where they are not able to come and meet me, or catch up with my ideas, I always try the best way to fit in or reach an amicable solution. I am also very transparent in my communication.
Reflected Best Self
Other people view me as a person with the leadership ability of adaptability. My adaptability strengths have been shaped by my background. I grew up while moving in three different countries from Indonesia to Singapore and finally the United States. To be effective as a leader, one needs to be able to learn the difference in the way to deal with different people and different cultures (McCrae & Costa, 2004). From the experience in the three different countries, I have adapted to the cultures and ways of life of the locals to a much bigger extent. This can be seen especially from the score from my big 5 personality results.
Also, from my big 5 personality results, I can say that I am more open and high agreeable person. I always try the best to give people a chance to speak so that I can get their ideas before I respond. I have also realized my agreeability nature makes me in a position to deal with different people, either bad or good. For instance, I can deal with bad customer care service or negative people that I come across always. In fact, I try to put people first. Whenever a “people issue" such as someone not the right person for his or her current position, enters my to-do list, I deal with it as soon as possible. As such, people refer to me as an influential individual.
There are usually very fundamental problems that challenge leaders. One of them is the extent of coming into terms with a negative attitude person. For such situations, I always do not back down my ideas but try to have the perfect chance to put across my points and concerns in a way that the person gets to understand my point of view. I engage on a quick intervention and sort out what is best for the situation so that I get things to working normally again.
Situational leadership
Another well known and useful framework for analyzing leadership behavior is situational leaderships. It is an extension of ship style continuum and three-dimensional leadership style. The basic premise of situational leadership theories is that different leadership styles are needed in different situations. For example, some research showed that democratic, participatory, permissive style is not necessarily the most effective in very situation. Vroom (1960) found that most effective styles were, in part, determined by the characteristics of employees.
Thus, he suggested that leaders need to adapt their style to the situations they are facing. The situational theories contributed two new elements to the development of leadership theories: the situation and the follower. These theories are prescriptive –attempting to tell leaders how to act when faced with challenging situations. Depending on the situation Vroom suggested that other leaders could use varying styles. There are two situational factors: the personal characteristics of subordinates and the environmental demand with which the subordinates need to cope up to accomplish goals and satisfy their needs.
PART B
When core values and beliefs are activated, the behavior that is encouraged in an individual would be expected to be in line with those core values and beliefs. Authentic leaders would be expected to highlight the values as well as the belief in the workplace that employees should strive to achieve while at the same time molding those values and beliefs to reinforce that in others. Values influence behaviors because they are used in deciding between alternatives. Besides core values are closely associated with the terms integrity and trust. Among the most common approaches to leadership development are theories that attempt to explain why some people are good leaders, and others are not and models that represent observed patterns of effective leadership that can be learned.
Leadership approaches have identified specific traits and characteristics held by leaders such as honesty, integrity, self-confidence, cognitive abilities, behaviors assumed by leaders based on situations (Hersey & Natemeyer, 1979). Ethical climate can be defined in general terms as norm, standards, expectations and practices accepted and reinforced by leaders. As observed high impact leaders are often driven by a set of core values that influence leadership behaviors. They have a strong sense of ethics, a clear and powerful vision, and a sincere belief in others. They model the values that define advanced followers. They build a vision around purpose, values as well as believe and transform an organization into a community, which involves the kind of commitment, devotion, and service that can make schools great. High-impact leaders have a philosophy and a set of beliefs that provide goals objectives and success agendas
In this case, my core values are loyalty, honesty and integrity. I believe that loyalty is the fundamental pillar that enables a team work efficiently together. When members of a team/group are loyal to each other and to the tasks they are up to, then it becomes easy for them to work on their duties. Besides being loyal, honesty is another virtue that beings the sense of responsibility. Working effectively on a particular task requires people to be honesty to ones duties and be open enough to tell the truth whatever the situation. Finally, integrity sums up my values. With integrity, I see myself as a respected leader who always stands on the side of good moral and ethical way of handling situations. It is also fundamental to note that these three values work hand-in-hand.
Leaders in any organization are required to embrace strong ethical values such as honesty and integrity and to be able to exemplify ethical behaviors such as trust by establishing and emphasizing the ethical climate such as confidence that is necessary to influence ethical behaviors. This ethical climate can be defined in general terms as norm, standards, expectations and practices accepted and reinforced by leaders. To become an exemplar of ethical behaviors, a leader has to become the embodiment of good practices, such as responsibility and accountability
The importance of ethics is captured in the practices of responsibility and accountability. Leaders are responsible for ensuring that ethical conduct is practiced and that unethical behavior, no matter how stubble, no matter how private are not. Leaders will be held accountable for not exercising their leadership in fostering an ethical climate. In other words, leaders in any organizations are challenged with the duty of establishing the necessary conditions such as opportunities to discuss ethical concerns for an environment that demand ethical conduct
While a leader's ethical or unethical behaviors can be rooted in their personals stories, ambitions, and personalities, there are societal industry and organizational factors that may encourage or impede ethical behaviors. Zarah, Priem, and Rasheed (2005) identify some of the organizational factors that may encourage or impede ethical behaviors of top leaders as being culture such as norms of behavior. Ethic is considered the core of everything individuals do in their activities ranging from driving to work, dealing with colleagues, resolving issues, to talking to friends and family members. This impact on daily deacons affects the way individuals interact with one another. In essence, ethics is the central focus of how someone ought to behave, to act, to respond: essentially how someone should live.
Corporate culture consists of the basic beliefs that guide organizational members thinking and practices (De Sousa, 2010). If the corrupt behavior is considered unacceptable in given, cooperate culture, if incentive and reward system encourage desirable and discourage corrupt behavior, and if managers and leaders act as positive role models living the appropriate rather than corrupt behaviors, the probability of corruption is very low. Even if single events of corrupt behaviors may occur, these may be quickly detected in a culture that is based on open and direct communication. Since bribery may become very costly, it pays to pay to consist attention the company’s specific culture as lived.
A company may install anti-corruption ombudsmen who link employee and management in the combat against corruption. It is, however, important that these ombudsmen and their work are appreciated in the company. This requires appropriate communication by top management including the ombudsmen rights. The most significant rights are to grant anonymity if they receive whistleblowing information and investigate suspicious events seriously and persistently. Furthermore visible consequences must be taken immediately after a case of corruption is discovered. The symbolic message of this kind of work is important and communicates conveying an organization's anti-corruption practice. Also, positive reinforcement instruments should be implemented. Social learning processes such as role modeling will only be successful if the observe motivated to reproduce the role models behavior. This requires appropriate initiatives such as positive role models, awards for good examples of ethical practices that are communicated publicly and in corporate publications.
References
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De Sousa, L. (2010). Anti-corruption agencies: between empowerment and irrelevance. Crime, law and social change, 53(1), 5-22.
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Zahra, S. A., Priem, R. L., & Rasheed, A. A. (2005). The antecedents and consequences of top management fraud. Journal of Management, 31(6), 803-828.
