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Compare Democratic and Autocratic Leadership

Good Essays

Leadership, a crucial element in business, can be defined as “a process of influencing the activities of an organized group toward goal achievement” (Yukl, 2013, p.76). There are four main types of leadership styles: the autocratic, democratic, paternalistic and laissez-faire leadership styles. Daft (2008, p.44) suggests that “the extent to which leaders should be boss-centered or subordinate-centered partly depends on organizational circumstances.” After taking into account the organizational circumstances, companies should be able to select suitable types of leadership styles. Therefore, it is worth arguing that the democratic style of leadership should be applied more frequently than the autocratic style of leadership, for example, in …show more content…

Referring to the statistics, “most descriptive case studies support the benefits of democratic leadership style.”(Bradford and Cohen, 1984) A rigorous analysis of over 500 such studies by Johnson and Johnson (1989) showed that supportive processes are far superior to conflict-inducing processes concerning group performance and members’ satisfaction. Accordingly, it is wise for leaders to conduct a substantial amount of counsel and empower their followers. Although distinguished in the modes of processing, the autocratic and the democratic leadership styles should both be achievement-oriented. Two styles of leadership are supposed to serve the same objective, which is enabling companies to successfully accomplish the targets with a decent standard of performance. It is clear from above that, in terms of power separation, enthusiasm of followers and decision quality, democratic leadership style modifies better than autocratic leadership style, especially in companies having flat organizational structure. In fact, diverse kinds of companies may need to adopt special styles of leadership according to their specific organization structures, culture or industries. Nevertheless, it is an increasingly accelerating trend to combine and adapt the autocratic and democratic leadership styles to the needs of particular companies.

References

Bradford, D. L., Cohen, A. R., (1984) Managing

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