Different leaders have different leadership styles, and nobody can accurately determine that one has a greater impact on team motivation than the other — it all depends on the circumstances. So what does it take to be an exceptional leader capable of motivating and guiding a team toward common goals?
Different leadership styles have varying effects on team motivation because how you treat your team members directly affects how they go about their work and interact with each other. Motivation levels can quickly go up (or down) by simply adjusting the tactics you employ in managing your team.
Let’s talk more about how the different leadership styles can affect a team’s motivation levels and what smart leaders should do to ensure that their team members are always on top of their game. We’ll also touch on some creative ideas for giving your team’s spirits a boost.
Does Your Leadership Style Affect Your Team’s Motivation?
The way you lead and manage your team directly affects their motivational levels. It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach where a leadership style you previously employed with one team will undoubtedly be as effective with your new team. You must be mindful of what your team requires.
If you don’t adapt your leadership style based on your team’s profile and needs, you run the risk of pulling their motivational levels down, so much so that you might soon encounter these issues:
- Poor team collaboration
- Poor engagement
- Low productivity
- Low levels of trust
- Frequent disputes
- High employee turnover rate
How Leadership Styles Affect Team Motivation
Today’s leaders apply many leadership styles, each of them presenting their unique advantages and drawbacks. To effectively and successfully lead your team toward growth and success, you must adopt the best leadership style that suits the organization’s unique needs.
Effective leadership allows you to efficiently perform your roles and responsibilities, including:
- Providing the team direction and guiding them toward shared visions and goals
- Appropriate task delegation
- Strategic decision-making
- Fostering a positive work culture
Here are the main leadership styles and how they can potentially impact a team’s motivational levels:
1. Charismatic Leadership Style
Charismatic leaders are generally appreciated and well-loved in their organizations. They are usually friendly, charming, engaging, energetic, and enthusiastic. They are also eloquent and highly persuasive, finding little trouble convincing others to take their side and accept their ideas.
Charismatic leaders typically lead by example, inspiring their team members to adopt favorable behaviors and a positive mindset. Employees are motivated to always give their best foot forward, deliver excellent work, and go beyond what’s expected of them because they’re inspired by a leader who walks the talk.
2. Democratic Leadership Style
Democratic leaders promote high collaboration within the team. They solicit their team members’ insights and suggestions on important issues and even encourage them to participate in decision-making processes. All these results in the team developing a high sense of ownership, empowerment, and commitment to their work, leading to higher motivation levels and peak job satisfaction.
This leadership style places a premium on communication. Democratic leaders actively listen to their team members’ inputs and concerns. They value their team’s contributions by considering all the feedback they collect before making decisions that will affect the organization. They always strive to keep communication lines open even when there may be team members having difficulties reaching out.
3. Affiliative Leadership Style
Affiliative leaders focus on creating strong personal connections within the team. They utilize these solid relationships to ensure faster conflict resolution, higher levels of trust, better camaraderie and collaboration, and a strong sense of community within the team.
This leadership style encourages team members to openly share their insights with the group without fearing judgment or rejection. An affiliative leader’s aim is to create a highly collaborative team where morale, engagement, and motivational levels are high owing to the deeper bonds formed that go beyond purely professional connections.
4. Coaching Leadership Style
In a coaching leadership style, great emphasis is given to each team member’s professional development. Coaching leaders help their employees set goals and formulate action plans to ensure that these are achieved. They spend time and energy mentoring their team members and providing relevant feedback to ensure consistency and growth, essentially becoming their greatest fans in the organization.
Employees who have established a definite career path for themselves will highly appreciate this type of leadership. They will be challenged and motivated to achieve their goals, especially since they’re aware that their leader supports them all the way.
5. Transformational Leadership Style
The aim of transformational leaders is to nurture and encourage their teams to thrive and succeed. They want their team members to enhance their skills and experiences so they can grow in both their personal and professional lives.
Transformational leaders motivate their teams to share fresh perspectives and help shape the business’ future by implementing smart strategies, spearheading innovations, and becoming agents of change.
6. Autocratic Leadership Style
The autocratic leader sets goals, gives instructions, dictates action plans, and makes decisions for the team without consulting or seeking input from anybody else. They give clear, precise instructions and rarely encourage feedback and questions. This allows them to swiftly make decisions and implement action plans without much delay. They’re also able to resolve crises faster.
However, this leadership style may put a damper on a team’s morale and motivational levels. Their limited involvement in planning and crucial decision-making for the group’s development makes team members feel undervalued, causing them to disengage. Furthermore, when fresh perspectives and new ideas aren’t shared, the team runs the risk of stagnancy.
7. Laissez-Faire Leadership Style
Laissez-faire leaders afford their employees the most autonomy and freedom among all the leadership styles. They promote initiative, creativity, and independence in strategizing, creating action plans, and making decisions for the team. As a result, their team members feel highly motivated and empowered, with a strong sense of ownership for their work.
The danger lies in knowing where to draw the line between independence and deference. Laissez-faire leaders may be putting the business’ welfare at risk by not providing sufficient team structure and utterly upsetting the power balance between leaders and employees. Some team members may also feel demotivated by the lack of clear direction and structure.
8. Bureaucratic Leadership Style
Bureaucratic leaders heavily lean on established protocols and rules in their leadership approach. They minimize risks for the business by adhering to these tried-and-tested guidelines in leading their team toward efficiency, consistency, growth, and success.
Sometimes, bureaucratic leaders may go so far in adhering to the established structures that they inadvertently overlook the value of flexibility and adaptation. Their rigidness may eventually make their team feel demotivated because they feel unseen, unheard, and unappreciated.
9. Visionary Leadership Style
A visionary leader inspires their team members to work toward a worthy vision. It may be as simple as securing 10 new clients by the end of the quarter or as grand as nabbing the top ranking in the industry’s highest-grossing companies.
Visionary leaders inspire their teams by giving them a clear, well-defined goal. They typically strive to ensure that each team member understands the vision and eventually adopts it as their own. These types of leaders encourage their teams to step out of the box and employ innovative ways to achieve their goals. They encourage their team to continually challenge the status quo.
The downside of this leadership style is that leaders aren’t always assured that everyone in their team will share their vision. If team members find their visions obscure, unrelatable, or too ambitious, it can result in team members feeling pressured to commit to goals they don’t truly believe in. Working toward an irrelevant vision may make team members feel unmotivated and uninspired to give their best, resulting in mediocre work.
10. Transactional Leadership Style
Transactional leaders bank on the reliability of recognitions and rewards systems to achieve their desired results. They utilize these incentives to inspire and encourage their team to meet expectations and produce quality work. It’s similar to bartering where leaders entice their team members with cash incentives, additional benefits, days off, or perhaps health and wellness packages to push them to deliver desired results.
Transactional leadership may not always be effective, especially if you have innovators on your team. They may find recognition and rewards shallow and unrewarding because what they desire is personal and career growth, not just ticking items off their to-do list.
This leadership style relies on established goals and standard organizational processes. It may potentially stifle a person’s creativity, eventually making them lose their drive and passion for their work.
11. Situational Leadership Style
Situational leaders are the most flexible and adaptable people to work with. They adjust to any given scenario and adopt the most appropriate leadership style. They assess the situation, observe how their team members behave, and identify which particular style will be most effective for each individual.
Since situational leaders focus more on the team members than on themselves, they make their employees feel seen, heard, valued, and looked after. This results in a more positive work environment where there is boosted team morale, better engagement, increased team loyalty, and higher productivity
Is Communication Crucial in Leadership?
No matter what leadership style you think best suits your team, it’s essential to place communication at the core of the group. Different communication styles work best with different leadership styles and team profiles, so it’s best to tailor-fit your approach to get the most out of it.
The way you communicate as a team determines how seamlessly, synergistically, and efficiently you can work together. As a leader, it would be highly advantageous to identify each of your team members’ communication styles so you can adapt to their needs and successfully work with them. Whether you’re a passive, manipulative, or assertive communicator, it’s essential to adapt your style based on each of your team members’ needs.
A friend told me about a previous team leader she worked with who was apparently an aggressive communicator. This leader wanted the last say on every issue and always insisted on having his way. One of her teammates, Joseph, was a quiet yet highly efficient guy — and apparently, he was a passive communicator. Their personalities and communication styles completely clashed, yet the leader refused to adjust to Joseph’s needs.
The team lost a skilled and experienced worker when Joseph decided to quit a few months later. They felt the impact of his loss because they had a hard time searching for someone who could fill his shoes. The organization would’ve profited a lot from such a proficient worker like Joseph if only their leader knew the value of flexibility.
How Do You Know You’re Fit To Be a Leader?
Not everyone is carved out to be a leader. It takes a lot of character strength, discipline, hard work, and mindfulness. It’s not all about acquiring top-notch skills or accruing a wide array of relevant experiences pertinent to the job. You have to be primed for the role and prepared to take on all the responsibilities that go with it.
You must also have your core values intact when considering a leadership role. Honesty and integrity, in particular, are crucial to earning the trust and deference of your team members. Without these core values, your ethical and moral standards might become questionable, and you’ll have a harder time reaping the benefits of an engaged, efficient, and productive team.
How Effective Leaders Boost Team Motivation
Boosting your team’s motivational levels is critical to ensuring high engagement, efficiency, and productivity in the workplace. It also helps ensure higher job satisfaction, team loyalty, and lower employee turnover rates.
Traditional team-building activities —such as good ol’ games of treasure hunting, tug-of-war, or pass the message — and cash incentives are perhaps the most popular methods, but as a leader, you must try more creative ways to lift your team’s spirits up.
Try these ingenious tricks for boosting team morale:
- Flashy public recognition for excellent work (think huge office banners and surprise parties)
- Empower your employees by promoting autonomy
- Go big on creative rewards (a health and wellness day for a job well done or treat the team to a spa day after a particularly hectic week)
- Invest in comfortable office chairs and couches
- Stock the pantry with your team’s favorite snacks
- Offer free coffee for everyone
Key Takeaways
A leaderless team is akin to a small child lost in the woods — there’s no clear direction, nobody is making sound decisions, vital opportunities may have been overlooked, and there’s a palpable sense of frustration and confusion.
Whether in routine (where your team should be able to depend on you to get things done efficiently) or crisis (where making fair but prompt decisions is better than making perfect but belated ones), your leadership style must meet the changing needs of your team. When you ensure that team motivation stays up, you can look forward to better engagement, efficiency, and productivity.
Sources
- Emeritus: Discovering Your Leading Style: A Guide to 8 Types of Leadership
- Indeed: Affiliative Leadership: Definition, Benefits and Tips
- Torch: The Style of Democratic Leadership
- BetterUp: Coaching Leadership Style: Examples and Skills to Get Started
- CIO: What Is Transformational Leadership? A Model for Motivating Innovation
- Very Well Mind: What Is Autocratic Leadership?
- NSLS: What Is Laissez-Faire Leadership?
- Sancus Leadership: What Leadership Style Is Optimized for Clear Communication?
- Sancus Leadership: The 5 Communicative Styles Huge Impact on Your Leadership!
- Sancus Leadership: How To Say You’re Ready for a Leadership Role!
- Sancus Leadership: 7 Powerful Ways Honesty and Integrity Impacts Leadership!
- Sancus Leadership: 5 Major Things That Happen to a Team Without Leadership!
- Sancus Leadership: Leadership in Routine and Crisis: What’s the Difference?
- Sancus Leadership: Situational Leadership and Small Team Motivation?
- Sancus Leadership: 7 Ways Great Coaches Boost Employee Motivation (for Leaders)
- Sancus Leadership: Boost Small Team Motivation Without Team Building or Money?
- Sancus Leadership: Secrets of Team Motivation: Goal Setting and Objectives (Part 4)
- Sancus Leadership: 10x Employee Motivation: How To Use the Power of Coaching
