Skills-Behavioral and Situational Approaches to Leadership-Nursing Paper Examples

Skills-Behavioral and Situational Approaches to Leadership

Leadership encompasses instrumental traits that influence a team of individuals or employees in an organization or business. While management offers oversight and controls organizational operations, leadership prioritizes engagement, motivation, and team productivity. Leadership concepts promote traits, styles, and principles of employee management. These concepts drive management standard behaviors and styles, including personality, behavior, skills, motivation, and initiative. Consequently, such skills and behavioral and situational approaches to leadership are crucial for any organization (Skills-Behavioral and Situational Approaches).

Personal traits are instrumental in shaping leadership skills. The trait theory of leadership asserts that good leaders possess common personal traits that mobilize people toward a common purpose (Vasilescu, 2019). The theory shows a positive correlation between good leadership and personality traits: extroversion, intelligence, conscientiousness, openness to experience, and self-efficacy.

Disposition tendencies aid in improving motivation and values among employees, while skills such as comfort with ambiguity promote effective leadership. Task competence skills such as emotional intelligence and emotional stability improve leadership execution. Interpersonal traits such as extroversion, active listening, agreeableness, and dependability promote social interactions (Skills-Behavioral and Situational Approaches).

Behavioral approaches define how leaders behave in duties’ execution. Task-oriented and people-oriented are the two common approaches expressed in leadership. While task-oriented leaders offer structure, rule, direct, control, and instruct the subordinates to get the job done and further the organizational goals, people-oriented leaders focus on creating positive relationships for the well-being of the subordinate staff (Yukl, 2019).

Thus, a task-oriented leader’s qualities entail constantly defining goals/structures, prioritizing outcomes, and sticking to rigid schedules. On the contrary, a people-oriented leader encourages mutual respect and open communication and prioritizes positive employee relationships. In this case, behavioral approaches to leadership elaborate on how leaders act instead of who they are. Importantly, self-awareness allows leaders to have self-knowledge about their thoughts and behavior (Skills-Behavioral and Situational Approaches).

On the contrary, situational approaches function or contextual factors and their direct influence on leadership behavior or the association between measures of effective Leadership and Leadership itself that is contingency. Situational approaches focus on the specific situation in an organization instead of the leader. The contingency theory by Fielders focuses on situational factors such as leadership power, task structure, and leader-team relationships (Deshwal & Ali, 2020). Therefore, the theory study’s situational factors’ effect on the leader’s influence on the follower’s-based leader’s leadership style preference between task-oriented and people-oriented approaches.

Secondly, the path-goal theory by Robert House elaborates on situational factors such as work environment, task ambiguity, and followers’ characteristics. Robert emphasizes situation-sensitive utilization of participative, supportive, achievement-oriented, and directive leadership approaches depending on the situation (Deshwal & Ali, 2020). A contingency theory by Vroom and Yetton focuses on short-term decision-making using different leadership approaches such as consultations, autocratic or group decision-making based on whether they are objectively sound task solutions and the extent of support by team members (Skills-Behavioral and Situational Approaches).

Leadership styles depend on the behavioral approaches leaders adopt to motivate, direct, and influence their followers. Thus, leadership style can be defined as offering direction, implementing plans, and motivating a team in a political, healthcare, or business setting. Transformational, delegative, transactional, and participative leadership styles are widely used today. Leaders should adopt suitable leadership styles and approaches to achieve their desired purpose (Skills-Behavioral and Situational Approaches).

References

Deshwal, V., & Ali, A. (2020). A systematic review of various leadership theories. Shanlax International Journal of Commerce, 8(1), 38-43.

Vasilescu, M. (2019). Leadership styles and theories in effective management activity. Annals-Economy Series, 4, 47-52.

Yukl, G., Mahsud, R., Prussia, G., & Hassan, S. (2019). Effectiveness of broad and specific leadership behaviors. Personnel Review.