Leadership and trust play a key role in promoting organizational performance and facilitating the achievement of the set objective. Effective leadership style determines how resources are managed and people motivated and directed. Trust supports leaders in winning workers’ trust and show better willingness in following the provided guidance and direction. Workers become open to their leaders and feel motivated to share issues affecting them. This helps create a favorable working environment where everyone shows determination in meeting the job requirement and develops interests that align with those of the organization (Asencio & Mujkic, 2016). This paper intends to evaluate the role of leadership styles in improving organizational performance, interpersonal trust, and behaviors.
Differentiated empowering leadership promotes interactions with followers and build their trust. This helps establish an integrative impact of both followers’ predisposition to trust and leaders’ trustworthiness (Li et al., 2017). Leadership improves knowledge management, trust, as well as organizational performance. Effective leadership enhances trust and encourages workers to gain confidence. It becomes easier for leaders to implement their ideas since workers would be willing to follow and support them.
There exists a significant and positive linear relationship among leadership aspects including leading self and people, trust, leading organization, organizational performance, and knowledge management in global organizations. Since effective leadership promotes confidence among workers and facilitates the appropriate implementation of knowledge management and teamwork (Koohang et al., 2016). Effective leadership is a building block of trust enabling leaders to understand their followers and address arising issues in a better way. Strong knowledge management processes facilitates the elimination of issues affecting performance making it possible to achieve better growth. Every organization should prioritize leadership training and development to ensure that appropriate skills are developed (Asencio & Mujkic, 2016). Although the training process may be faced with many challenges, measures should be put in place to overcome them and ensure that leaders have the necessary skills to lead self, people, and organization.
Leadership entails a process of refining and defining skills through continuous improvement, growth, and development. It shows that leadership can be improved through mentoring, practice, guidance, and coaching. Effective leaders can help advance innovation, lead change positively and support organizational growth. They support the development of a strong and clear vision and establishment of business strategies (Asencio & Mujkic, 2016). This is achieved through enhancing inclusion and diversity in the workplace. Leaders are expected to empower, motivate, coordinate, listen, and organize people to achieve the organization’s mission and vision. Moreover, they should understand their strengths and perfect them while working to improve their weaknesses (Koohang et al., 2016). It is necessary to seek feedback and work on it to improve their capabilities and utilize every learning opportunity in the best way possible.
There is a positive relationship between knowledge management, interpersonal trust, and organizational performance. To build trust in an organization, leaders should use effective styles to enhance a good working environment. This promotes knowledge sharing which is important as it leads to individual empowerment that positively impacts overall productivity. Many leadership styles influence a positive impact on organizations including transformational, autocratic, democratic, transactional, and bureaucratic (Asencio & Mujkic, 2016). Leaders are expected to identify the most effective style to apply based on the nature and expectations of their organization. A certain leadership may be effective in a given situation but fails in another area.
In every organization, leadership has become an important entity through promoting knowledge, technological innovations and supporting a change in demographic and social trends. Leadership is considered the main contributor in building change in an organization. Effective skills are known to yield positive organizational outcomes and support the making of appropriate decisions (Asencio & Mujkic, 2016). A leader is expected to motivate, encourage and recognize people whether working in teams or individually. When effective leadership is utilized, it leads to job satisfaction, trust, positive relationships, knowledge sharing, and overall improved performance.
Effective leadership is pinned on delegating authority and sharing information that is crucial for the establishment of a favorable working environment. The dynamic work environment requires an authentic leader who understands the behaviors that impact others. Strengths and weaknesses are part of a leader’s behaviors and recognizing what builds relationship and trust is important (Asencio & Mujkic, 2016). Authentic leaders are considered highly committed to creating job satisfaction through the processing of information in a more balanced and coordinated manner.
Leaders are expected to transform and drive organizational change and take the business to a higher level. The transformational leadership style improves the ability to make desirable changes such as idealized influence, intellectual stimulation, and inspirational motivation. Idealized influence calls for instilling beliefs, values, respect, and a strong sense of mission and purpose (Asencio & Mujkic, 2016). Intellectual stimulation entails accepting different perspectives and stimulating thinking while inspirational motivation is involved in motivating and inspiring those in the subordinate cadre.
The transactional leadership style promotes the role of organization, supervision as well as group performance, which play a role in the improvement of interpersonal trust. It encourages taking measures to motivate workers such as rewarding high performers who are determined to offer quality work and meeting their job expectations. Rewards include pay rise, awards, promotions, recognition, appraisal, advancement, and provision of health insurance cover. Although rewarding only benefits good performing workers, others are motivated to make an extra effort and gain recognition. This helps create an environment that promotes healthy competition and facilitates the achievement of organizational goals. Moreover, leaders in this style use punishment to influence followers to improve their potential and quality of work (Asencio & Mujkic, 2016). It is based on the understanding that people perform better when a clear and definite chain of command is provided, subordinates need appropriate monitoring, and every follower must obey the provided commands and instruction.
Effective leadership behaviors promote the engagement of the team and its productivity and eventually enhance interpersonal trust. Some of the beneficial behaviors include innovation, taking initiative, developing others, being collaborative, communicating clearly, and having a clear vision. Being directive, participative, and supportive influences workers to trust their leaders. Workers usually feel motivated to work with leaders who are friendly, approachable, and dependable (Asencio & Mujkic, 2016). Supporting the team, helping them address arising issues, and learn from their mistakes help leaders gain trust with leaders. This implies leaders in global organizations should make an effort to be considerate to others and make them understand that their issues are of interest.
Leaders must be compassionate and show empathy to workers to encourage them to remain focused on the achievement of the set goals and objectives. Leaders who take actions to eliminate stressors in the work environment show genuine interest in the team’s success that brings a positive impact in terms of trust development (Asencio & Mujkic, 2016). Trust is an important factor that supports leaders in the achievement of their objectives. It promotes the relationship between leaders and their followers and nurtures integrity, honesty, openness, competence, and loyalty (Koohang et al., 2016). Leaders should trust that teams are capable of completing assigned tasks as required while workers should know that they depend on each other to succeed. Employees should have confidence in achieving corporate goals and trust would support hard work.
Reflection on the Strongest and Weakest Dimension of Trust
Differentiated empowering leadership theory is a motivation theory that has affected my motivation. It improved my ability to influence other people to work hard, develop positive perceptions, and gain interests that are in line with those of the organization (Temminck et al., 2015). It determined the extent of autonomy and authority given to my team and supported the empowerment of everyone. Moreover, it has encouraged the participation of team members in the decision-making process while promoting meaningfulness of work. By placing a role in the improvement of trust among the team members, this theory has promoted confidence and encouraged everyone to take part in assigned activities.
I faced with a situation that required strong leadership and trust two years ago when I was working with an international company based in Saudi Arabia. Since workers were from diverse backgrounds, differentiated empowering leadership theory influenced my followers to gain trust in me (Li et al., 2017). This theory has boosted my motivation through providing effective methods of addressing arising issues and handling people with diverse backgrounds. It has made it possible for me to understand the operating environment and achieve greater objective. I used the concept to support effective interactions with workers and created room for understanding and appreciating each other. Establishing teams helped workers learn more about other cultures and gained desirable skills that promoted productivity. The concept can be applied to motivate employees since it would support the provision of favorable working environment for everyone.
The experience helped me realize that my strongest dimension of trust is integrity since I am capable of demonstrating sound ethical and moral principles. I always like doing what is right regardless of my location, situation, tasks ahead, and whether I am being supervised or not. This means that I am accountable, self-aware, truthful, and responsible for my actions. My trust influences other people to follow and depend on me for the delivery of quality work and achievement of the set objectives. Since I am honest, everyone in the workplace is usually willing to work with me and make every necessary effort to facilitate the achievement of the set objective. Everyone feels encouraged to contribute to solving the existing problems and improve the situation. Integrity motivates everyone to make positive contributions and ensures that organizational objectives are achieved.
To perfect my leadership skills, I am working on improving “openness” since it is my weakest dimension of trust. I am sometimes hesitant or unwilling to be forthcoming with others particularly when the outcome is undesirable. I feel unease when sharing bad news with workers since I tend to sympathize with them. Although I am uncomfortable sharing certain reports, I am determined to learn and always do what is right.
References
Asencio, H., & Mujkic, E. (2016). Leadership behaviors and trust in leaders: Evidence from the US federal government. Public Administration Quarterly, 156-179.
Koohang, A., Paliszkiewicz, J., & Goluchowski, J. (2016). The impact of leadership on trust, knowledge management, and organizational performance: A research model. Industrial Management & Data Systems, 117 (3), 521-537. Web.
Li, S. L., Huo, Y., & Long, L. R. (2017). Chinese traditionality matters: Effects of differentiated empowering leadership on followers’ trust in leaders and work outcomes. Journal of Business Ethics, 145(1), 81-93. Web.
Temminck, E., Mearns, K., & Fruhen, L. (2015). Motivating employees towards sustainable behavior. Business Strategy and the Environment, 24(6), 402-412. Web.