Leadership a tale of two coaches Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Leadership a tale of two coaches - Essay Example Bobbi Knight and Coach K are two famous basketball coaches that achieved great success and whose leadership styles were completely different. This paper will discuss those two coaches and their leadership styles. Fielder's contingency theory is made up of leaders who are task oriented and those that are relationship oriented. It is based on the orientation of the leader, the elements of a particular situation and the leaders' orientation. Task oriented leaders do best in low to moderate control situations while relationship oriented leaders do best in moderately controlled situations. In the case of our two coaches, we would have to place Bobbi Knight in the task oriented leadership and Coach K in the relationship type. Furthermore each leader has a different kind of leadership power. That power is referent, expert, legitimate, reward and coercive. Power is part of the leadership influence. Coach Knight used coercive power, though many people liked him, he was able to accomplish what he did through coercion. On the other hand Coach K had referent power. His team sincerely liked him and played well because of it. He also used some coercion but his primary power was referent. In determining which of the coaches was a leader and which a manager, it appears that Coach Knight was the manager and Coach K the leader. The reason for that is that Coach Knight wielded the big stick. Do it my way or not at all which is more a management style, although not a great one. On the other hand, Coach K allowed some critical thinking from his players and brought them through the processes together, this is really leadership style. Five Factor Model The Five Factor Model supported in the text by McCrae & Costa (1987), is a model that describes human personality disorders and gives a basis for the general understanding personality. There are five factors that are considered and they are called the "big 5" (Bradshaw, 1997). These big 5 factors are neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness (Northouse, 2010). The OCEAN concept combines. Each of these traits has characteristics. These characteristics are noted in the table. Characteristics High Scorers Factor Characteristics Low Scorers Creative, original, curious, imaginative Openness-Toleration for exploration of the unfamiliar Unartistic, conventional Organized, reliable, neat, ambitions Conscientiousness-Individual has degree of organization, persistence, and motivation in goal directed behavior. Unreliable, lazy, careless, negligent Talkative, optimistic, sociable, affectionate Extraversion-Capacity for joy, need for stimulation Unartistic, conventional Good-natured, trusting, helpful Agreeableness-Ones orientation along a continuum from compassion to antagonism in thoughts, feelings, and actions Rude, uncooperative, irritable Calm, content, secure, unemotional, relaxed Neurotism-proneness to psychological distress, excessive cravings or urges, unrealistic ideas Self-pitying, worrying, insecure, emotional, nervous According to the text, most managers have an extroverted personality. Certainly in the case of both of these coaches there are extroversion traits in their personalities. They are both talkative and optimistic while Coach