Leadership is the process of motivating and encouraging a group of individuals with different characteristics to work together as a unit and fulfill the common goals or company objectives while maintaining a healthy relationship with everyone and treating everyone with respect.

Importance of leadership in the workplace

• Plays the role of the guide – Employees would require guidance in everything that they do in an organization be it a method of work or any other decision, it would require the guidance of the leaders to point in the right direction (Bozyi?it 2019).
• Plays the role of teacher and mentor – The leaders also have the important responsibility of teaching the employees important aspects that they do not know such as the policies or at times how to do certain kinds of work (Ndalamba, Caldwell and Anderson 2018).
• Maintains team unity and harmony – for a team to be successful it is important to maintain harmony within the team. Every member should respect each other and their culture at the same time the leader has to make sure that the team has good chemistry and learns the essence of working together as a unit.
• Maintains ethics – Needless to say, the leader will be in charge of maintaining the organizational ethics by controlling the various factors and situations that lead to ethical dilemmas. The correct ethical decision should be taken by the leaders in that place.
• Motivates and drives toward organizational goals – Every organization has a set of goals that they wish to achieve. And the leaders have the responsibility to make sure that their team is always motivated and plays their role or rather does their part in the contribution towards the ultimate goals of the organization (Holten and Brenner 2015).

Characteristics of Democratic leadership

• High employee engagement – Democratic leadership focuses on the engagement of the employees as this leadership style believes that it is important to maintain a constant flow of communication between members allowing for better chemistry (Beerbohm 2015).
• Encourages creativity – This style of leadership always encourages creativity which is the ultimate goal for the members of the company. Increase creativity would mean that there will be significantly new ideas and methods that employees may apply or suggest which naturally is a good thing in a team.
• Encourages teamwork – The main aim of this style of leadership is to primarily encourage teamwork. They do not believe in an individual effort the leadership style believes in improving together and growing together with achieving together the goals and objectives.
• Diversification in ideas – This leadership allows a lot of brainstorming as the leader encourages everyone to share their ideas and then ideology is that no idea is a bad idea. Hence this adds a lot of diversification to the ideas that are generated to work with for the aim of reaching the targets.
• Gains in productivity – Needless to say when the team has good chemistry and naturally the team will perform more and when they do the outcome will be for productivity to increase. There will be a significant increase in their overall productivity.

Characteristics of Autocratic leadership

• Quick urgent decisions can be made – Autocratic leadership style does not involve people in decision making and does not consider the opinion of other people. Hence the decision will be more quick and efficient, especially in situations where there is an urgency.
• Less confusion in orders – The policy of one man giving orders of what is needed to be done naturally reduces the confusion. The technique is such that only one person will be giving instructions so employees will have to listen and follow one person rather than multiple people saying various things which would be confusing (De Hoogh, Greer, and Den Hartog 2015).
• Strict coordination – At any given point of time the autocratic leadership style allows the employees to be more coordinated as this type of leadership functions with strictness and not much freedom is given hence if the employees are told to work with a group of individuals they have to despite their desires (Dyczkowska and Dyczkowski 2018).
• Discipline – This by far is the strictest style of discipline where the leader expects to make the employees work with discipline which means they will follow the basic hygiene of work. Such as coming to work on time, sending reports and other updates diligently it is important to have discipline and no other leadership provides more discipline.

Industry or organizational functions are appropriate

• Marketing functions (Branding and promotion) – The marketing industry or department, in general, is where this kind of relationship is required. It is to be understood that the branding and promotion part of the functions requires creative ideas. Democratic leadership as we know encourages brainstorming and creativity hence these will be perfect for branding and promotion activities.
• Digital marketing industry – The digital marketing industry which includes social media marketing and other factors like SEO, influencer marketing requires a creative sense and an attitude toward encouraging diversification. The democratic style focuses on diversifying growth massively this will allow everyone to collectively work and make the companies thrive (Kilicoglu 2018).
• Advertisement industry – Advertising requires a lot of artistic and creative sense hence democratic leadership that completely focuses on creativity and gathering of ideas which means that naturally, this industry will thrive better under democratic leadership
• Research and analytics function – Every organization requires research and analytics, this is the part where the same thing can be done in various ways. Hence the employees should be given the freedom to try various methods on their own to find something that is suited for their task.

Autocratic leadership

• Sales – A strict hardcore target-oriented job would require an aggressive cold strict leader who is completely target-oriented and allows strict instructions from only one source. This is perfect when it comes to sales as they want clear instruction and even they want a strict and aggressive leader.
• Operations – For a department or function where everything has to be maintained or executed with discipline where confusion can be costly hence to be avoided at all times at the same time instructions from the leadership is to be strictly followed is perfect for autocratic leadership.
• Finance or financial analyst – A formula-oriented operation where rules are to be followed. In a job where creativity is not required however everything is to be done based on rules and policies and models are to be followed without any breaking the flow autocratic is perfect as they will make sure that employees strictly stick to the by the book approach (Sfantou et al. 2017).

A leadership style that matches my leadership style – Democratic leadership is the style that matches my personality and from my personal experiences, it is quite obvious that I have the traits of a democratic leader.

My characteristics that match the leadership style

• Being friendly with everyone – The first symbol is being friends with people. As I grew up I have always been friendly with people. I love talking to people in a friendly way with everyone and have the attitude of being everyone’s friend and helping everyone those are in need hence this quality is justified.
• Encouraging diversity – Encouraging diversification is something that I have. I grew up in a mixed cultural community with diversified people qualities. These things never bothered me I was always looking forward to meeting new cultures people and being a part of their traditions this allowed me to know their culture more hence I am without any doubt someone who loves diversification and I always encourage everyone to know each other’s culture and dive into its depths as there is plenty that can be learned.
• Combining and discussing various ideas – The concept of having one idea and one execution is something I have never done. I always prefer to discuss functions and decisions before implementing as different people may have different ideas and there could be better ideas than my idea. Hence I believe in discussing everyone’s idea and collecting the positive parts to combine and create a better more effective plan or idea in general. brainstorming can always be useful and has always generated positive results.
• A strong believer in teamwork – Being the captain of the football team back in high school and middle school it is quite obvious that teamwork is something that I strongly believed in hence this specific trait of believing in teamwork and working together to grow and achieve together was something I always had that matches the democratic leadership style.

It is important to understand that democratic and autocratic leadership are completely different from each other. At the same time, it can be concluded that they have different characteristics, and quite obvious that they are suited for different jobs. Each kind of leadership is suited for different jobs, industries, or functions. Creating situations would require certain kinds of leaders. After studying and observing it has come to my realization that I have the qualities or rather the traits of a democratic leader hence it is my ambition to strive as a democratic leader.

Reference

Beerbohm, E., 2015. Is democratic leadership possible?. American Political Science Review, 109(4), pp.639-652.

Bozyi?it, E., 2019. The importance of leadership education in university: Self-leadership example.

De Hoogh, A.H., Greer, L.L. and Den Hartog, D.N., 2015. Diabolical dictators or capable commanders? An investigation of the differential effects of autocratic leadership on team performance. The Leadership Quarterly, 26(5), pp.687-701.

Dyczkowska, J. and Dyczkowski, T., 2018. Democratic or autocratic leadership style? Participative management and its links to rewarding strategies and job satisfaction in SMEs. Athens Journal of Business & Economics, 4(2), pp.193-218.

Holten, A.L. and Brenner, S.O., 2015. Leadership style and the process of organizational change. Leadership & Organization Development Journal.

Kilicoglu, D., 2018. Understanding Democratic and Distributed Leadership: How Democratic Leadership of School Principals Related to Distributed Leadership in Schools?. Educational policy analysis and strategic research, 13(3), pp.6-23.

Ndalamba, K.K., Caldwell, C. and Anderson, V., 2018. Leadership vision is a moral duty. Journal of Management Development.

Sfantou, D.F., Laliotis, A., Patelarou, A.E., Sifaki-Pistolla, D., Matalliotakis, M. and Patelarou, E., 2017, December. Importance of leadership style towards the quality of care measures in healthcare settings: a systematic review. In Healthcare (Vol. 5, No. 4, p. 73). Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute.