Paper

“Decoding the Team Conundrum: The Eight Roles Executives Play” by Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries

By: Jennifer Jones Nation

In the “Decoding the Team Conundrum: The Eight Roles Executives Play” by Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries, a number of leadership “archetypes”, or ways of leading in a complex organizational environment, are explored. These “archetypes” represent prototypes for understanding leadership behavior. Ideally, an executive team which represents a number of leadership “archetypes” should be able to cover all the leadership needs that are required to make an organization effective. It is, however, argued that individualistic notion of leadership is inadequate given the increased complexity of the work environment. Although there is still the theory of “Great Woman or Man”, most of the scholars of leadership recognize that successful organizations are characterized by a distributive, collective, and complementary form of leadership.

Eight commonly found leadership “archetypes” are identified. The “archetypes” described are strategist, change-catalyst, transaction, builder, innovation, processor, coach, and communicator. A description is given of each “archetype” that includes what it means working with and managing each of these types. These in-depth descriptions form the foundation of a Leadership Archetype Questionnaire.

In my personal opinion, I feel that in a perfect work world this would be existent. I, personally, work in an environment where my supervisor has no interaction with me what-so-ever. I realize that this borders the X and Y theory of management. I am not able to see where the “archetypes” would apply to my situation. I honestly cannot classify my supervisor into any of the described “archetypes”. I would be very interested in seeing where my supervisor would be in the Leadership Archetype Questionnaire.