Leadership Styles and the Potential Behavior Responses in an Organization
The public health service provider Aidensfield Hospitals Trust (AHT) delivery of its core
services like chronic and acute patient care for children and the elderly and its ancillary
services like laundry and catering have suffered from a decline in service quality,
employee performance and working procedures. AHT’s support staff are comprised of
groups from four to six people including a supervisor, working in three eight-hour shifts.
Organizational roles are unclear, arrangement with supervisory personnel is
inconsistent and communication and understanding amongst teams, managers, trade
union representatives and employees on vital organizational policies and rules and
their implementation is deficient. The human resource (HR) department has delegated
some of its functions to line managers and independent groups which has resulted in
job insecurity and low morale.
Organizational leadership styles impact an organization’s culture and the behavior of
employees. Leadership styles involve emphasis patterns and the frequency of particular
leadership behaviors or attitudes that a leader practices on various leadership functions.
The three basic leadership styles are the autocratic, transactional and transformational
styles.[1]
The autocratic style aims to obtain obedience and conformity to the directives of the
leader from the workers in an organization, disregards ethical review or input by
subordinates and in the long run, provokes negative reaction from them.[2] The
management of AHT obviously lacks a centralized leadership that will lay down
business policies and rules and implement them, and that will also serve as a point of
reference for employees in matters of ambiguity and disputes in operations. The
absence of a clear definition of the HR department’s duties or plain disobedience
to directives is evident in the department’s delegation of its functions such as employee
selection, discipline and grievance to line management.
The transactional style basically reacts to employees’ performance and recognizes
compliance to directives, but does not address employees’ needs and development.
The leader’s focus here is on the tasks that have to be performed by positions in the
organization and the exchanges between leaders and followers, while at the same time
also using active and passive criticism and feedback.[3] The existence of independent
work groups within AHT due to demarcated traditions suggests that the leader
selectively focuses on a group that has a priority job to perform without much regard to
the hierarchy of positions in the organization. The group-centered culture has also
gained prevalence over the interests of customers, which is bad for business.
The transformational style is characterized by motivation and individualized
consideration of employees and the focus on the development of their intellectual
and professional capabilities.[4] AHT has showed no quality whatsoever of
transformational leadership due to its strained management-employee relationship.
The delegative or laissez-fair style of leadership is what seemed to have prevailed at
AHT. This is the least productive kind of all, because a leader with such a style offers
no clear policy on operations and poorly implements rules within the organization.
While the style can work in situations where a group in an area of expertise is
composed of highly qualified members, it frequently leads to ambiguity of roles and
lack of motivation.[5]
According to a study, there is no connection between workers’ perceptions of
organizational politics with situational variables like job autonomy, hierarchy level,
formalized departments and favorable climate of organization. However, there is a
connection between workers’ perceptions of organizational politics with dispositional
variables like being at the mercy of others and cynical beliefs on human nature, morality
and the acceptability of manipulation to get one’s goals.[6]
Based on another study, one’s perceptions of job and leader is strongly related with
one’s psychological well-being, while the psychological dimension in workers’ leaders,
work groups and organizations is strongly related with one’s work attitudes.[7]
[1] Nora J. Johnson, Thomas Klee, “Passive-Aggressive Behavior and Leadership Styles in Organizations”,
AllBusiness, 1 November 2007,
<http://www.allbusiness.com/company-activities-management/management-corporate-culture/5508711-1.html> [accessed 19 May 2011}
[2] ibid
[3] ibid
[4] ibid
[5] Kendra Cherry, “Lewin’s Leadership Styles”, About.com Psychology, 2011
<http://psychology.about.com/od/leadership/a/leadstyles.htm> [accessed 19 May 2011]
[6] Nora J. Johnson
[7] ibid
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