Management Style

The quality and style of managerial leadership is crucial in shaping perceptions which will support cultural values and an organizational strategy (Milkovich & Boudreau, 1991). The two authors mentioned about how to identify personality characteristics which can determine successful leaders. The book postulates three kinds of supervisors or leaders: first, authoritarian leader is a person, who decides everything and asks others, especially subordinates to follow.

This type of supervisor or leader sticks to his/her own idea of how to get jobs done. It is likely to be called centralization, which is perceived currently as not a wise way to do business. Centralized leaders can bring about demoralization in workplace, disgruntled employees, high turnover rate, and unproductive workers, leading to low productivity as a final result. Second, democratic supervisor is a leader who pays attention to subordinates’ idea and contribution. He/she involves everyone below into decision making and sharing information as inputs in doing works or solving problems. Comparing the democratic leader to the concept of decentralization, we can find compatibility.

Decentralization is about sharing power to lower level, encouraging team work, motivation of transferring and broadening responsibilities to lower level, and authorizing greater involvement in communication and decision making, etc. (Hoogendoorn & Brewster, 1992; Ivancevich & Donnelly, 1975). Everyone has his/her own responsibility for doing jobs. So, decentralizing line of authorities to low level of management becomes an effective tool of management.

Another advantage of decentralization is power dissemination to low level management, so top level management can take time and effort to think of drivers of success of an organization rather than spending much time to deal with some negligible staff activity. Unlike centralization, decentralization can encourage employees to work harder, commit to an organization, and become productive workers. Third, Laisser- faire, by Milkovich and Boudreau (1991), is a leader or supervisor who avoids any decision making responsibility when possible. The kind of person tends to leave this burden to individual subordinates by providing less guidance.

Based on the description of three types of leadership behaviors, we can draw a short conclusion that authoritarian leadership is an outdated adoption and leads to low productive workers and high costs incurring inside an organization. In the contrary, decentralized leadership style can help firms win employees commitment, constitute high morale, creativity, and good supervisor-subordinated relationship (Milkovich & Boudreau, 1991). However, output under authoritarian leadership style is a bit higher than under democratic one, but even lesser if laissez-faire leadership style comes into practice.