Leadership Styles as Recipes for Transformation (Published)
The success of any organization depends on the leader and the leadership style use in driving the organizational processes. This makes leadership studies or researches a recurrent exercise. This study therefore attempt to ascertain the leadership styles used by the commissioner in National Insurance Commission, Abuja-Nigeria to motivate and empowers the staff in the commission as well as explore the leadership-change behaviour exhibited by him in introducing change and managing the resistance thereof in the commission. To achieve this, the study relies solely on interview to generate the necessary information that will help in addressing the objectives since the study is a pilot personality-based research. A 15-item structured open-ended interview questions which derive its content from the objectives were used. Since only the commissioner participated in the study, his responses to the questions were taken as the findings of the study. From his responses, it was found that, he used both the transformational and transactional leadership styles in driving the transformation processes in the commission. His unique skills such as visionary, good listener, initiator, communicator, delegator, mediator and a manager was observed to be instrumental in helping him achieve effectiveness in the commission. It was also observed that, participation, delegation, conducive working environment and competitive remuneration package used by the commissioner empowers and motivate the staff in the commission. Again, strategies such as change needs identification, employee participation, communication, training of change agents and the use of palliatives aided the commissioner in successful change implementation. The associated resistance was managed through vigorous publicity of the need for change, feedback mechanism and coaching among others. The study therefore concludes that the success of any organization depends on the leader and his leadership style or styles
Keywords: Change, Leadership, Motivation, Qualities, Transformation, styles