Adaptive Leadership Personal Statement

The end of our academic year holds great excitement for me, as I expect an outcome of graduation with my first degree, an Honours B.A. of Psychology; and hopefully the opportunity to be published in a scientific research journal with the results of my thesis experiment. I envision having feelings of confidence and satisfaction upon the completion of this vigorous task. I believe my persistence through this semester will ultimately determine the height of my academic standing come graduation this June. I find myself feeling somewhat “burnt out” as I am enrolled in five courses and am completing a thesis project during this semester. I hope that this does not lead me to underperform, and possibly jeopardize future endeavors in law or graduate

Further, our course section on identifying adaptive challenges, bettered my understanding of conflict resolution, providing me with new strategies to apply in my academic and personal life, and ultimately improving my ability to be a successful student. I was fascinated reading about the division of technical versus adaptive leadership approaches, and how and when they should be taken. I felt like this concept leaves a lot of room for interpretation, and critical thinking when assessing a situation or conflict; especially from the adaptive approach. Technical challenges are left to those of expertise in correcting specified fields; yet at the same time, “it is essential that a leader also know when [their] authority is not sufficient or appropriate to address a particular challenge” (264), and an adaptive approach is taken “when people’s beliefs, attitudes, and values are affected by a problem” (264). As a social psychology student, knowledge of new approaches is always helpful when contemplating theories and studying human interaction. I am interested in possibly studying the approach of adaptive leadership in role playing within a controlled design setting, to investigate how well humans can adopt this role, in pairs. This will help me become a better social psychology student in that I can propose novel research to my advisor and show initiative, and inevitably learn more about the limitations of this

From the path-goal theory approach, I will need a leader who initiates structure, guiding me through the instructions about each new task and lesson, “what is expected of [me], how it is to be done, and timelines” (117), but who is also supportive, promotes participative leadership and achievement oriented. The leader will need to be able to adapt to my needs as a learning student, and I will seek out such supports. I will also need support from my family and institution to encourage and recognize me in my new field, as this will be key to my