Leadership THOUGHT RESPONSES

Please respond to each prompt in at least 100 words. These are thought responses and will require no references, just your thoughts on the prompts.

Prompt 1:

Leaders are seen from different perspectives such as someone powerful or with authority. However, these two characteristics are different. Someone with power has the ability to influence another person, while authority is influence that is based on perceived legitimacy. Power is necessary for authority, though it is possible to have power without authority. Power is essential for effective leadership and goals achievement.

The ability to influence other people is a leader's major power.Power changes people and the effect on those holding the power ranges from becoming more generous to abusing their power and exploit others. Although power is necessary to accomplish organizational goals, power also leads to abuse and corruption. It can also be a destructive factor in leadership. Excessive power can impair the leader's ability to make good decision which will affect the entire organization negatively. A way of preventing power abuse is the sharing of power to allow subordinates to participate in the decision making. This will also help the leader not to have all the power alone, it will lead to a higher quality decision and subordinates' sense of accomplishment. The proper use of power in an organization is essential to a leader effectiveness.

Prompt 2:

In any organization, leaders must have power to be able to achieve the common goal or the mission of the company. A leader should know when and how to use that power as a tool. If power is used incorrectly, the leader will be seen as authoritarian, and in some cases abusive. If power is used correctly, the leader will gain respect and the followers will do anything to maintain that trust and will work together to achieve the goals. There are many kinds of power, coercive power is the least effective because it relies on threats and forcing someone to do the "leader" wants. In my opinion, the Expert Power is the most effective because not only the leader has master the skill of persuasion, but also has the expertise, knowledge and career information that can be excellent in order to motivate and persuade others. I have also seen several cases of Reward Power used both efficiently and inefficiently. The problem with the reward Power is that, in most cases, the same people in the organization get rewarded, and the person that is struggling with the policies or procedures of the company, never get rewarded. Sometimes those employees are lacking commitment because they lack training, or the onboarding process was not complete. Leaders sometimes use the rewards too often than people get used to get rewarded and only produce good results because of the reward, and not because they want to do better at their job, or want to get promoted, so at the end, those employees quit to pursue other jobs with better rewards.