Directive Leadership Style
This style is characterized by leaders making decisions for others and expecting followers to follow instructions. The directive leader is adept at giving instructions, setting expectations, and establishing timelines and performance standards. However, it is possible for the same leaders to display both directive and supportive behavior as per the demands of the situation.
What is Directive Leadership?
This style is an autocratic style focused on the high task/low relationship. The leader defines the roles of followers and tells them what, when, where, and how to do different tasks. One way communication flows from the leader to the followers. Leaders tell their people exactly what to do, and how to do it. In this approach, the leader focuses his interactions with followers on goal achievement and spends a smaller amount of time using supportive behaviors. Task behavior reflects how much a leader is concerned with the actual task at hand and ensuring that those following him complete it. Using this style, a leader gives instructions about what and how goals are to be achieved by the subordinates and then supervises them personally.
Activities associated with directive behavior are guiding and structuring followers’ activities, planning, scheduling, and assigning responsibilities, defining roles and communication patterns for followers, motivating and conveying expertise, monitoring and following up on assignments, clarifying expectations, goals, and work methods. Transformational leaders can be directive or participative, authoritarian, or democratic based on the demands of the situation.
Characteristics of Democratic Leadership:
- Directive behaviors help followers accomplish goals by getting clear directions, establishing their goals and objectives, evaluation criteria, timelines, roles, responsibilities, and specific sub-tasks to achieve the goals.
- A directive leader sets clear standards of performance and makes the rules and regulations clear to subordinates.
- Being directive ensures accuracy and eliminates time-consuming mistakes
- Rewards may also be increased as needed and role ambiguity decreased (by telling them what they should be doing).
Situations where Effective:
- This may be used when the task is unstructured and complex and the follower is inexperienced.
- From the follower’s perspective, this kind of behavior provides role clarity, clear expectations, satisfaction with work and supervisor, satisfaction with the organization, lower stress, and increased performance.
- This style is used at length within the law enforcement and military communities as well as on manufacturing assembly lines, providing a means of managing a diverse group of people that span a wide range of experience and maturity levels.
- This style is generally appropriate for professionals who are in the early stage of their career and need to learn organizational behaviors.
- This increases the follower's sense of security and control and hence is appropriate to the situation.
Situations where Not Effective:
- The directive leader usually aims to restrict or limit the creativity or initiative of the follower.
- This style of leadership avoids collaborating or empowering others
- Directive behaviors are most of the time is one-way communication that specifies what is to be done and the task can be accomplished and assigning the responsibility for doing it.
Related Links
You May Also Like
-
Narrative leadership is interpreted as the leader who aspires to construct leadership by telling stories. Leadership is a task of persuasion, of winning people’s minds and hearts. Storytelling is thus inherently suited for the task of leadership. Learn about the narrative leadership style and how to use this style to inspire and motivate followers or to manage change.
-
Bureaucratic leadership relies on a clear chain of command and strict regulations. Bureaucratic leadership style is a very decent style for work involving serious safety risks, such as handling toxic substances, moving large objects. The focus is on compliance with rules and laid down procedures to make sure that the group is doing their job correctly and safely. Learn some advantages and disadvantages of this style and situations in which this style could prove to be effective.
-
Collaborative leadership is all about collaborative problem-solving and decision-making or can also be defined as the leadership of a collaborative effort. . The term started to appear in the mid-1990s in response to the formation of long term public-private partnerships to rebuild public infrastructure. Learn how you can use principles of collaborative leadership to enhance your leadership skills for being an effective leader.
-
There are four major factors in leadership called Leader, Follower, Communication, and Situation. The success of the leader is dependent on how the leader is effectively able to communicate and motivate followers to perform desired tasks using the appropriate leadership style best suited for the given situation. Interdependencies and dynamics of these four factors of leadership must be considered by a leader to be effective.
-
Facilitative Leadership is all about involving the employees in the decision-making process at all levels enhancing their sense of ownership, responsibility, and motivation. Facilitative leadership style uses a number of indirect communication patterns to help the group reach consensus and build commitment for the decision taken. To be effective in modern organizations, managers need to become facilitative leaders, learn what it means to be a one.
-
We define Lean as the systematic elimination of waste through a continual effort to decrease inefficiency; the lean leader strives to create a more efficient organization. Lean leadership is a philosophy. It is a consistent way of thinking and being in your role as a leader. The focus of this approach is on raising new leaders and help their team embrace a culture of continuous improvement. Learn what we mean by lean leadership style and its principles.
-
A good leadership style is something that every effective leader must have in order to succeed, but identifying what that entails or does not entails might be difficult to understand. Most of the research on leadership focuses on the exemplary, best practices, and positive attributes of effective and successful leaders. This article talks about a new approach to learn leadership using lessons from bad leadership. That is the lessons to be learned by examining leaders who have not effectively exercised their power, authority, or influence.
-
This style is characterized by leaders making decisions for others and expecting followers to follow instructions. The directive leader is adept at giving instructions, setting expectations, and establishing timelines and performance standards. However, it is possible for the same leaders to display both directive and supportive behavior as per the demands of the situation.
-
What are the functions which a leader does to establish as a leader? What are the activities undertaken by them to become great leaders, rather revolutionary leaders? The most important tasks done by a leader in all situations are defining the vision, mission, and goals, leading the team, administrative functions, motivating followers, decision making and conflict resolution, and continuous development.
-
Leadership has been defined in different ways by different sets of scholars. In very simple terms leadership can be defined as the skill of a person to influence an individual or a group for achievement of a goal in a given situation. One can use different dimensions and perspectives to define leadership. Through the evolution of leadership thought, leadership has been defined in various ways discussed here.
