Self-Assessment Paper

Self-Assessment Paper

There are many tools and techniques available for developing a specific individual plan of action whether it is in your personal or professional life. In this paper I will examine my weaknesses and strengths based on the self-assessment tests and my personal experience and come up with a course of action to improve myself in specific areas.

Leadership comes in many forms, dependent on the leader's personality, the group situation, and the problem at hand. Each person has a leadership style that they feel comfortable with. The role of leadership in management is largely determined by the organizational culture of the company. It has been argued that managers' beliefs, values and assumptions are of critical importance to the overall style of leadership that they adopt. One way of looking at different styles of leadership is in terms of task orientations versus employee orientation. Task Orientation or Directive Behaviour reflects how much a leader is concerned with the actual task at hand and ensuring that those following him complete it. Employee Orientation or Supportive Behaviour reflects how much a leader is concerned for the people around him, providing support and encouragement for them (Vecchico, 1998).

The leadership test "What's My Leadership Style?" is an instrument that measures the degree to which a person is task or people-oriented. My score for concern of people was 6 and for concern for task was 15. According to the instrument a high score for task-orientation is above 10 and low is below 10.

For people-orientation a high score is above 7 and a low score is below 7. From my results it is apparent that my leadership style is more task-oriented than people-oriented. The best leaders are ones that can balance their task-people orientation to various situations (Vecchico, 1998). Based on the test results and my own experience I tend to be more autocratic where I want to dominate team-members to achieve the objective. This approach is not very efficient as it generally results in passive resistance from team-members and requires continual pressure and direction from me in order to get things done.

Since I am too task-oriented I get the job done, but at a high emotional cost. In future I want to improve on my people-orientation style of leadership. I am going to continue to be strong at my task-orientation because if just improve on my people-orientation the leadership may be overly laissez-faire. When this happens people are likely to be happy in their work, but the productivity gets greatly heart. This approach would leave the teams floundering with little direction or motivation.

My leadership style will be strong if I improve on my people-orientation and continue to be strong at my task-orientation. This is more leading to a style of a democratic leader. The democratic leader makes decisions by consulting his team, whilst still maintaining control of the group. The democratic leader allows his team to decide how the task will be tackled and who will perform which task. A good democratic leader encourages participation and ...