Reflective Essay on an Organizational Problem
Introduction
In my summer job, I and my fellow group members faced some issues in completing the project assigned by the leader. My leader made a group of members, including me from different backgrounds to complete the project plan for new stadium. The leadership style of our leader was autocratic as he did not assign the responsibility to anyone to make decisions, but retain all authority by himself and made all key decisions related to project. In addition, he was not involved in the two-way communication to motivate the employees to achieve organizational goals. In turn, the issues occurred that led to failure to complete the project plan on time.
Issues faced during the Project
As identified earlier that the leader of our group had an autocratic leadership style. In turn, I and my fellow group members face issues in completing the project plan assigned to us. It can be ascertained by the fact that all the members of our group felt demotivated because of strict rules. He criticized the employees and imposed penalties in case of low productivity. In turn, the morale of the members decreased and conflicts raised. The conflicts raised because of no initiatives in the work. There was no planning and organization in completing the project because the leader wanted us to do what he seemed right. I and my fellow members were not able to show innovation and identify creative ideas. Due to poor leadership style, various issues raised between groups members also.
For instance, social loafing occurred as there was no monitoring system to examine the individual efforts. Most of the members did not complete their work, but got credit of the work not done by them. In other words, there was lack of group cohesiveness because the members were involved in internal competition. Accordingly, lack of group cohesion, lack of motivation and social loafing contributed to lack of engagement. The leader was not able to persuade the members in an effective manner as he did not use any motivational tool like extrinsic or intrinsic factors to motivate. Poor communication by the leader increased the cross-cultural issues as no training was provided to communicate with the members with other cultures. The key reason of all issues was the autocratic leadership style because a leader is a person that drive the employees through positive attitudes, motivational strategies, high level of engagement, and conflict management techniques.
According to Juli (2010) the autocratic leadership style leads to project failures due to the rigid behaviors linked to it. The success of the project depends on the effective leadership style of the leaders with the urge to solve issues and motivate employees to achieve organizational goals. Hence, some recommendations are provided that could have implemented by my leader to avoid the issues faced by me and my fellow members that contributed to project failure.
First of all, the leader should have changed his leadership style to manage the overall situation effectively and efficiently and for the successful completion of project plan. Transformational leadership style is the key leadership style because transformational leaders inspire their subordinates to let go of their own interests for the benefit of the organization. These types of leaders motivate employees to have a clear vision, share values and beliefs. They take the organization as a big harmonized working system in which it is important to delegate the responsibility to achieve desired goals (Van Tassel, 2012).
The leader should have adopted the transformational leadership to focus on the innovation, flexibility and to increase the level of engagement. The attributes of transformational leadership style include empowerment of subordinates, group cohesiveness and agreeableness (Griffin, 2013). The leader could have used the group cohesiveness to decrease the cross-cultural communication issues. It is the extent to which group members are engaged with each other (Lussier & Kimball, 2009).
Group cohesiveness could have developed by increasing the level of equal participation of each group member in the project planning. In turn, level of group cohesiveness and engagement would increase to achieve the desired goal. Equal participation of each member in the project planning decreases the internal competition and increases the group cohesiveness. In addition, the leader should have focused on the two-way communication to enable employees to share ideas and problems to solve to make an effective project plan. Most of the time, I got confused how to share my idea with the leader to make a positive change in plan. However, due to one-way communication I had to follow the instructions provided by the leader. If the leader used two-way communication, I can easily communicate my ideas to him and did not feel demotivated.
Moreover, the leader of our group should have applied the emotional intelligence strategy to reduce the conflicts raised due to lack of group cohesiveness, one-way communication and social loafing. He could have used emotional intelligence to assess and manage conflicts. As Petran (2008) provided a notion that emotionally intelligent leaders can better handle stress and conflict. Moreover, they can influence their followers’ emotions to increase growth of organization and level of achievement of goals (Petran, 2008; Sivanathan & Cynthia Fekken, 2002; Barling, Slater & Kevin Kelloway, 2000). He could have used his personal, emotional and social skills to assess the effectiveness of group members’ functioning in the current environment to take steps in assigning roles.
In addition, the leader could have used the intrinsic and extrinsic motivational tools like rewards, feedback, recognition, and job enrichment (Marques & Dhiman, 2016) to motivate the group members, including me and to persuade us to put extra efforts to achieve desired goal than power and coercion. The above identified recommendations could avoid the situation of project failure if were followed by the leader.
Conclusion
It can be concluded from the above discussion that it is important for a leader to have an effective leadership style to avoid the issues and to get desired goals. Autocratic leadership is not the successful leadership style in an innovative era. On the other hand, transformational leadership style helps to manage employees by inspiring, motivating and persuading them to organizational goals. The attributes to transformational leadership and strategies used by these types of leaders reduce communication issues, conflicts, and social loafing and increase the level of motivation, engagement and group cohesiveness. Ultimately, enable employees and leaders to achieve not only their personal goals but also organizational goals.
Bibliography
Barling, J., Slater, F., & Kevin Kelloway, E. (2000) ‘Transformational leadership and emotional intelligence: An exploratory study’, Leadership & Organization Development Journal, Vol 21, No. 3, pp. 157-161.
Griffin, R. W. (2013) Fundamentals of management. USA: Cengage Learning.
Lussier, R. N., & Kimball, D. C. (2009) Applied sport management skills. USA: Human Kinetics.
Marques, J., & Dhiman, S. (2016) Leadership Today: Practices for Personal and Professional Performance. USA: Springer.
Petran, M. P. (2008) An exploratory study of executive transformational leadership, wisdom, and emotional intelligence in management process turnaround situations. USA: ProQuest.
Sivanathan, N., & Cynthia Fekken, G. (2002) ‘Emotional intelligence, moral reasoning and transformational leadership’, Leadership & Organization Development Journal, Vol. 23, No. 4, pp. 198-204.
Van Tassel, J. (2012) Managing Electronic Media: Making, Moving and Marketing Digital Content. USA: CRC Press.
