Comparison of Leadership Models and Styles Part One

My personal model of leadership is participative. I like to get everyone’s opinion when engaging in decision-making. By gaining their inputs, it allows everyone to feel like a stakeholder in the organization and to feel that their thoughts are valued and their opinions respected. They also feel that what they say makes a difference, so long as the leader is able to reflect their input in the final decision. As a leader, ultimately, the decision comes down to me—but as a leader it is also important for me to stay informed about what others are thinking and what I can do to reflect their values more within the company. As a doctorally prepared advanced practice nurse, my aim would be to include people in the decision-making process as much as possible. This means I would be putting their need to be heard and listened to and acknowledge ahead of my need to make decisions. It would benefit all of us in the sense that I would be more informed about what my workers want and how they see things, and in that sense I would be better prepared to assist them in their professional development.

My personal model of leadership reflects a process of servant leadership in the sense that it allows me to cater to the needs of others through specific actions of listening, hearing, acknowledging and reciprocating. Servant leadership is about putting the needs of others first, but it is also dependent on the ability to act in a way that assists the individual worker in growing and developing professionally and personally (Russell & Stone, 2002). In order to listen to workers and hear their concerns, a leader has to do more than call a meeting, however. The leader also has to recognize what is not being said verbally: it is about using one’s social and emotional intelligence to hear them and to understand what they are saying even in non-verbal forms of communication, and then responding to those needs accordingly (Cacamis & El Asmar, 2014). A participative type of servant leadership allows me to do just that by asking my workers for input and inviting them to be part of the process of change. As all workers need to develop accountability skills, this...

They get to observe how what they say has in impact on the organization and then they get the opportunity to take ownership of that change. I put my position as a leader to the side for a moment and focus wholly on them and give them the opportunity to speak and to tell me about what they would like. Afterwards, they recognize that they are expected to the standards that are applied as a result of their input and this facilitates their professional growth.
Servant leadership can be compared to other styles of leadership, such as transformational leadership and transactional leadership. Transformational leadership focuses on giving workers a vision of what they should be striving to achieve, motivating them to want to achieve that goal, demonstrating individualized attention when needed, and providing workers with a rationale or intellectual reason for why doing this will improve them (Warrick, 2011). Transactional leadership focuses more on rewarding employees for achieving a goal—i.e., there is a transaction or incentive that is offered: a leader will provide a prize, so to speak, for every worker who accomplishes a specific task or transitions to a new platform, etc (Barbuto, 2005). Transformational leadership contains aspects of servant leadership in the sense that the transformational leader is willing and able to provide individualized attention to workers to help them address their specific needs, which is the essence of servant leadership. It also supplies a great deal more in terms of modeling the type of behavior that the worker is meant to follow and emulate. Transactional leadership is less like servant leadership in that it merely focuses on rewarding good behavior, but that too shares a similarity with servant leadership in that the goal is the same—to get workers to embrace good habits and become better workers.

Leaders can implement the servant model by listening, hearing, helping and supporting their workers. Transformational leaders can implement their model by communicating a clear vision of what the worker should strive to be, show the worker how to get there, support the worker in his…