Bridge On The River Kwai Character Analysis

In the movie The Bridge on the River Kwai, the leadership techniques and styles of the two key leaders, Colonel Saito and Colonel Nicholson are persistently in conflict. Both men have significantly different personalities and both come from conflicting cultural backgrounds. Yet, these two have one common goal: to build a bridge. Both men have conflicting leadership styles and approaches to achieving this goal. This film is a great exploration in how conflicting leaders can eventually learn how to work together to achieve one common goal. In investigating the themes of leadership style, effectiveness, and power as demonstrated between the two leaders, we can see how these conflicting characters achieve their common goal.

Colonel Saito and Colonel Nicholson demonstrate different leadership style which is critical in military commanding and any other organizational unit. At the beginning of the movie, it can be noted that there is a clash of ego and differences in opinion between Nicholson and Saito. Saito is hell-bent on ensuring all men get to work irrespective of their cadre which is contradictory to Nicholson’s strict discipline which makes him assert that his men are not supposed to offer manual labor. Their labor management and project execution approaches seems to differ and this can be highlighted as shown below.

Colonel Saito conducts himself as a transactional leader while Colonel Nicholson shows himself to be a transformational leader. These styles can be supported by the fact that Colonel Saito attempts to command and lead from the front by forcing prisoner English servicemen to work beside their men and he takes control in his hand when he fells the Engineer has not delivered desired results (Bourke 65-8). On the...

... middle of paper ...

...aders bridging the gap between cultures and personalities. Saito and Nicholson were able to negotiate despite their different cultural influences and personality in order to complete the task. Overall, Nicholson was able to achieve his personal goal of retaining the pride of his troops while Saito lost out on his personal goal of trying to break the soldiers. This was at the expense of achieving his other personal goal of avoiding seppuku at all costs. Unfortunately, once the men had achieved their mutual goal, their achievement was destroyed by outsiders. Those who destroyed this cultural bridge were unaware of the connection between the two leaders and how hard they had worked to come to an agreement. Despite the destruction of the bridge, Saito and Nicholson could appreciate their achievement of being able to collaborate together when it had seemed impossible.