Leadership Styles Relationship- and Task-Based Leadership Styles

Leadership Styles

Relationship- and Task-Based Leadership Styles

In leading groups and organizations, managers and leaders alike adopt different kinds of styles or approaches to be able to achieve specific objectives. These objectives could include establishing rapport and cohesion within a group, be it from a team or organizational level. Another objective that a leader could aspire to achieve is to focus on accomplishing the task or work at hand, regardless of the nature of the relationship between the leader and his/her team members/employees. Alternatively, a leader might aspire to maintain both relational and performance aspects of his responsibilities for his/her team or organization. Thus, s/he would work deliberately to maintain a balance between maintaining good relationships with group members and successfully accomplishing the task assigned to the group.

The types of leadership described above are illustrative of either the relationship-based or task-based leadership. Relationship-based leadership style is characterized by a kind of leadership that cultivates "three highly interrelated and mutually reinforcing dimensions: shared purpose, social support, and voice" (Avolio, 2009:432). Relationship-based leadership helps maintain the leader's authority through a shared understanding and knowledge of the people or members within the group. Further elucidating on these three dimensions of relationship-based leadership, Avolio's study looked at "shared purpose" as a form of socially-reinforced alignment of the group's or organization's goal. It is bordering on task-based objective setting, but the focus is on the relationship formed among members as they seek to align and achieve their group's goals and objectives.

In the same vein, social support is another dimension present in a relationship-based leadership. Social support within a group means "providing emotional and psychological strength to one another," and is strongly linked with the dimension of having the same goals and objectives to achieve as a group. The third and equally important dimension is voice, wherein every member of the team is able to voice out his/her thoughts and feelings, in effect contributing to a certain extent on how the shared goals and objectives can be achieved by the group (Avolio, 2009:432).

Given these dimensions critical to a relationship-based leadership style, situations that make this kind of leadership style suitable is when a group or organization is working in a highly-socialized task or project and each group and member are interdependent on each other for work support. A group working on a social development project, for example, requires a high level of interdependency as each group works with communities and would require each other's support. A team assigned in an implementation area, for example, would need support from each other as they try to establish rapport and familiarity with the communities they will be working with. A relationship-based leader in this case would be the primary person that the group will turn to for moral and psychological support. It is at this point, then, that the leader's relationship with the group becomes critical: to achieve success within the group, the leader must be "accessible" enough for the group to approach to, and in turn, the leader must be able to inspire the group that it would lead to the achievement of the group's goals and objectives.

Task-based leadership, meanwhile, centers on the efficiency of a group in accomplishing its goals and objectives through specific tasks that ultimately lead to project success. In fact, a task-focused leader can be likened to a project manager of an information technology group: every stage of the project is defined by schedules, individual or team member assignments, task success or failure, and budget. The objective of a task-based leader is to accomplish and finish a project, and does not put much emphasis on personal relationships among group members. However, since communication is key in the success of a task or project, there is a deliberate effort from the leader to establish communication protocol or systems that will ensure that issues are communicated and resolved immediately. The dependency of each group member is critical in the success of the project, but each member is also driven to accomplish a task and not mainly to establish good personal relations with the other group members (Solansky, 2008:334).