Leadership Styles

Leadership (Prof. Cavelzani)

General Management Core Module 5B

Author: Johannes Brandner, 19.04.2016

Essay: “My personal leadership style with referring to Northouse P.(2016):

Leadership”

Professional experience – an introduction

When I started at Südzucker/AGRANA 5 years ago, I was exhilarated to attend an

international trainee program within 5 European countries. In the beginning my primary

focus was on developing my expert knowledge, but due to the different locations, colleagues

and supervisors I realized that these different people and circumstances are a unique chance

to observe leadership in practice. Therefore I am already interested in setting those

observations and experiences in context to the suggested theory models of “Leadership” by

P. Northhouse and the lectures in the upcoming week. Furthermore an interesting point is

that there might be a difference in behavior in cultures and countries. Also if I just was based

2 months in each: Germany, Poland, Belgium, France and Romania, had the perception, that

Supervisors in different countries treated their employees using different strategies and

styles. This goes hand in hand with the suggestions in the chapter “Culture and Leadership”,

different countries have different scores in performance orientation in-group collectivism,

assertiveness orientation, gender egalitarianism, humane orientation, institutional

collectivism, power distance and uncertainty avoidance.

Due to the fact that I am not leading people in my daily work at AGRANA, it is difficult to

write about my personal leadership style. Therefore I will try to summarize the most

important models and concepts of Northouse and incorporate observations of my personal

experiences and beliefs so far.

Trait Approach

The trait approach focuses exclusively on the leader neither on the followers nor the

situation. The model emphasizes that having a leader with certain traits is crucial for

effective leadership. Employees like...