Team Work: Five Characteristics Of Leaders And Followers

Leaders and Followers

In management a big part of success is having team work which includes both leaders and followers. A group with all leaders will be very unsuccessful. A group with all followers will also be very unsuccessful. Every successful group has to have a mixture of leaders and followers. In our book, work teams are defined as a small number of people with complementary skills who hold themselves mutually accountable for pursuing a common purpose, achieving performance goals, and improving interdependent work processes. A part of a work team is the leadership position which is defined as the process of influencing others to achieve group or organizational goals (Williams, 290). When looking at a work team there has to be a leader,

"Scholars are starting to acknowledge an overemphasis on the leader as actor and followers as reactors (Scrone, 4)." People are realizing that a team will not be successful without followers because of the many characteristics that they have to have. Leaders and followers are equally important in a work team because the effort is not one sided. Followers need to be just as effective as leaders because leaders never have all the ideas they run with any of their followers ideas to make them better or add parts that they might not have access too. There are many characteristics that an effective follower can have that makes a team stronger. Five characteristics that an effective follower should have are respect, tolerance and positive attitude, listening and communicating, understanding, and

Leaders cannot complete all the tasks alone, so having followers that can offer suggestions on how to make tasks move quicker and more efficient are greatly appreciated. Offering suggestions allow comments to be moved around on different concepts and idea while not offending the original creator. Ideas that can grow stronger when there is a leader with an underlying idea and that have followers that can add suggestions. This makes it so the team itself can grow stronger by making each idea and task stronger. For example, the leader makes a statement that was possibly moved down through management and ended up as a task of other employees but it 's because they have easier access to team work and team meetings. Then the task can be moved back up through management with multiple ideas stitched to it for them to make a