Types of Leadership

According to "The Essential Guide to Group Communication" by O'Hair and Wiemann, there are four decision making styles that group leaders can exhibit. The first type of decision making style discussed in the text is authoritarian leadership. This type of leader makes all of the decisions and does not consider anything that the other group members have to say. The other group members are not involved in the decision making process and they tend to not work very hard toward accomplishing the group task. Consultative leadership is completely different from authoritarian leadership. With consultative leadership,the group leader ask the group members what they think and then makes a decision. Sometimes group members do not care for this type of leadership because they feel that the leader is just asking them their opinions and not considering what they say. Another type of leadership is participative leadership. In this style, the group members and the leader work together to make decisions. This style of leadership can result in "higher quality decisions" and result in "greater satisfaction." The fourth type of group leadership is laissez-faire leadership. With this type of leadership, the leader does not really do much leading and the group just attempts to get the task done. This style of leadership is not very effective and is considered to be the least satisfying management style. I found this section of the reading to be very interesting and informative. Prior to reading this section of the chapter I did not know about the four different decision making styles.