Hi everybody and welcome to the Chapter 2 video lecture. Chapter 2 introduces the idea of leadership styles, which is a concept we'll be using a lot as we go through the course, so it's important to understand what these styles are and the distinctions between them. It's also important to understand that a person doesn't have a particular style that they use in every situation. These are always contextual. Any one of us might use all of these styles. in different situations. So on page 41 of your textbook, you'll find an explanation of the three main leadership styles that we will be working with. These styles are called authoritarian, democratic, and laissez-faire. And in the upcoming slides, I'm going to spend some time explaining each one of these. Let's start with the authoritarian leadership style. With this style, the leader is making decisions and then the followers have to carry them out. Now, students often bristle at this idea of leadership, or they feel it's not the kind of leader they'd like to have or to be. But like everything else in leadership, the appropriate choice depends on situation and context. Is the leader yourself? Sometimes it will be appropriate to use this style of leadership. If you are a parent, you probably have used this style many times. If you tell a child to do something or not to do something, it's not up for discussion. You know that they're about to harm themselves perhaps, and you're expecting your orders to be carried out. In a leadership context, think about the military. When an order is given, it needs to be acted upon. A decision was made by higher-ups. But enlisted men and women don't have all the information that went into the decision, and there really isn't time to explain all the background and get consensus. It may be a life and death situation, so there needs to be a certain obedience there and that they carry it out. If you were an expert mountain climber leading an expedition to climb a mountain, you might choose to use this style because you know what the dangers are and your inexperienced followers do not. You might not use the authoritarian style in every situation, but in that one, you might take it on. So, authoritarian leadership is appropriate in those kind of situations, but if it's misused, it can offend followers. So, reflect on this and think about times in your past where maybe you have used this style with others or someone else has used it with you and whether or not you felt it was appropriate for the situation. The second kind of leadership style that our authors talk about is the democratic leadership style. And in this style, the leader is consulting followers and involving them in the process. So decisions are made a bit more collaboratively. This tends to be the kind of leadership that students favor and think is best. But again, I urge you to consider that the appropriate style to use is always a contextual, so it will not always be appropriate to consult followers. In designing this class, I created lessons and assignments. I could have brought everybody together on day one and said, okay, well, first thing we got to do is decide what to learn about and should we have a textbook or not? And if we vote to have a textbook, well, here are 50 leadership textbooks that are on the market. You guys decide which one you want. That style would not work efficiently in a teaching situation. So that's an example. of a context in which democratic leadership might not be appropriate. In many workplaces, especially smaller workplaces, it can work very well and lead to a really motivated and engaged team of workers. And the third kind of leadership that our authors tell us about is called laissez-faire leadership. Laissez-faire is a French term. It literally translates to let to do. And this is a hands-off style of leadership, which It might sound great, but sometimes people can't function well without guidance. You may have had leaders like this who don't pay a lot of attention to followers, and things can go off the rails if the leader is not appropriately engaged with followers. So it has its pros and cons. It can be appropriate if you have a highly skilled and highly motivated group of followers. Then you can kind of tell them what to do and back off and let them do it and they won't need a lot of oversight. So those are the three leadership styles that we learn about in this chapter. Again, please understand what the characteristics of each one are and the distinctions between them. And always keep in mind that any leader could use all of these in different situations. So we won't say that this person is an authoritarian leader or is a laissez-faire leader and label them that way. What kind of leadership are they exercising in a situation? Remembering that leadership is a process of influence. So which of these styles of influence are they using? Another important idea in this chapter is task and interpersonal leadership. These are two different aspects or dynamics of leadership that are at play at the same time. Two aspects of any communication situation, but especially in the workplace. There is the task or the job to be done, and then there are the interpersonal relationships among the people. So the most efficient situation is going to have a good... balance between those dynamics. Let me give you an example. Have you ever been in a group in class that's doing a group project and you need to meet outside of class? So you decide you'll meet at the library from 4 o'clock to 5 o'clock to work on the project. You get there at 4 and some people are late and they drift in and then you end up shooting the breeze for the first 45 minutes, talking about your weekend and what you're going to do on the upcoming break and things like that. And it's not until there's 15 minutes left that you actually get down to doing the task. Now, that might be fun for some people and really frustrate others. In that case, you probably spent too much time on the interpersonal aspects and not enough time on the task to be efficient. Now, to turn that around, you've probably had leaders that focused solely on the task at the expense of good relationships between people, not realizing that good relationships are going to help people accomplish the task better. So there's a balance to be struck there and a leader can help facilitate that balance. If people are focusing too much on the relationship, maybe it's time to pull them back toward the task. You know, if they're goofing off, having a little too much fun and the work isn't getting done, it might be time to kind of rein them in and redirect them toward the task. If there's too much focus on the task and people are getting frustrated, maybe it's time to take a break and have some fun and work on developing those relationships. And a good leader knows when the appropriate time is for that as well. On pages 48 through 54 of the textbook, our authors give us some models of this idea of the task and relationship balance. Now, communication models are pictures or explanations, lenses we can look through to think about different things. So these models depict the task and relationship issue in different ways. Some of them depict task and relationship as two distinct things. Others see them as happening at the same time. So look those over, make sense of them, and consider which of these resonates most with you. Which model do you think you employ in your own leadership activities? In thinking about this balance between task and relationship, consider what would be the ideal approach for a professor to take, and how do I, as your instructor, try to balance the task and interpersonal aspects in the way I conduct this online course. An online class could easily be all task. The instructor could easily be very laissez-faire and just put content out there and expect everybody to work on it without a whole lot of guidance. I take a different approach. Does my approach make me a more effective instructor? And you can argue both sides of that. I'm not asking for you to agree. Just to consider that some people taking an online class might prefer a more task-focused approach. Teachers, leaders, bosses have to navigate this balance all the time, whether they're aware of it or not. So after you've read the chapter carefully and paid special attention to those models and other things I asked you to study carefully, it'll be time to work on the task list and I look forward to seeing your assignment for this week. If you have any questions or problems, shoot me an email. Otherwise, I'll see you over in the next module.