Leaders, Followers and Situational Factors

A leader is someone who acts to help a group attain objectives through the maximum of his abilities while a follower can be described as a servant or subordinate who accompanies an important person. Situational factors are environmental factors that an organization may use to contribute to their set working conditions. Leadership is the ability of directing or guiding people to do a certain type of work. Leader characteristics, follower characteristics and the situational factors can influence the leadership effectiveness in different ways. Leaders who are goal oriented sets goals and have a vision of what they want to attain in the future and nothing would stop them from attaining it. Good working conditions can influence leadership effectiveness. For instance, if an organization has good conducive environment, working machines, which are in the right order and the type of communication is free flow, the workers will be motivated and will do their work effectively and efficiently.

Leadership effectiveness can also be enhanced by followers who possess good communication skills and personality. In addition, one ought to be able to work with other people in a team and is able to understand and communicate with the leader and other team members. If the follower is loyal and trustworthy to the organization, the employer will believe in him and will want to work with someone they trust and can keep the secrets of the organization thus it will influence leadership effectiveness. They are some challenges leaders might encounter when engaging the leadership process and strategies to effectively address the challenges.  They may include, change of technology as we know it is changing now and then. There might be a new technology, which is brought about in the organization and the workers do not have the right skills and they are reluctant in knowing them.

The leader is supposed to educate the workers about the new technology and how it will influence the organization and impose the new skills in them.  There is the challenge of workers resisting to change. The organization may want to change the leadership style they are working with example if they are working with democratic type of leadership style and they want to adjust to autocratic, the workers may resist the change because they do not know what it is and what it will bring into their lives. The strategy to effectively address this challenge is to call the workers for a meeting and inform them about the change, then educate them and tell them the effectiveness it will bring to the organization.  

There are others situational factors such as work group, where leaders have large number of people reporting to their desk thus become unable to monitor all of the factions at same time due to time and the tasks allocated to each. In order to overcome this challenge, a leader needs to be assigned to a group with few people which one is able to monitor. Therefore, the organization needs to have a span of control so that the leader can know how many workers are reporting to him (Hall, 1999).

The leader may also be faced with a challenge and be stressed if the people working under the portfolio are not trustworthy and expose the secrets of the organization to the public. In order to overcome this, the leader needs to be informing the workers that they are to take an oath of secrecy about the organization before they are employed.  Knowledge and confidence might be challenges to a leader if he does not have knowledge about the work he is supposed to do in an organization. He may not have confidence in the work he does and also in leading people. These can be overcome by taking the leader for training so that he may get the knowledge about the work he does and also have confidence in leading people.