First off there are the authoritarian and democratic leadership styles. With the authoritarian style, the leader has one hundred percent control, making decisions single-handedly, and giving orders, leaving no room for employee input. The democratic style takes a different view, with the supervisor letting employees have input and power in the decision making and problem solving for the department. Finally, with laissez-faire leadership, under which the supervisor lets the employees completely direct, and control themselves, with no leadership from the supervisor. With all these different styles of leadership, it is a common thought that the type of leadership depends on the circumstances. In Fiedler’s contingency model, Fred Fiedler says that a leader should determine whether their leadership style is going to work in a certain situation, and if it does not, they should try and change the situation to where their leadership style will be effective. In contrast, the Life cycle theory of leadership says that the leader should try to adapt their leadership style to the situation, instead of the other way around. Lastly, the Path-goal theory of leadership says that the leader should focus on promoting rewards, and the behavior that must happen to achieve those rewards. I have had supervisors from pretty much every one of these categories. The ones that were the hardest to work …show more content…
The ideal process through which a supervisor would make a decision would be with the rational model. With this, the supervisor identifies the problem, then the alternate solutions. Next they gather and organize facts, objectively evaluate the alternatives, choose and implement the best alternative, and get feedback and take corrective action. Because this is such a long and intensive process, it is not something that supervisors can, or are willing to, go through with. Other times, the supervisor may be simply lacking in ideas for alternatives. Sometimes simplicity is needed in the decision making process, though it may not always be the best solution. Bounded rationality is also used at times, which is a decision that meets the barest standards of what is acceptable. While this is sometimes useful, as with decisions of little importance where the time to come up with a better solution would cost more than a better solution would save, a better solution could possibly have been thought of had the extra time been taken. This is obviously not a good technique to use with high-importance decisions. Other decision making traps that leaders need to steer clear of are recency syndrome and stereotypes. When a supervisor tends to only remember and make decisions off of recent events, the decisions will not be as