Stars - Alba Velasco and María Mula

Hi everyone, we are Alba and María, and this week we have been the stars of our activity. The task has consisted on doing a presentation explaining the advantages and disadvantages of six types of leadership: authoritarian, democratic, paternalistic, laissez-faire, transactional and transformational. Here you have some of the main characteristic of each type:

 -Authoritarian: It can be effective in work environments where decisions need to be made quickly but in fear of followers being unproductive, authoritarian leaders keep close supervision and feel this is necessary in order for anything to be done.

- Democratic: This style of leadership encompasses discussion, debate and sharing of ideas and encouragement of people to feel good about their involvement. However, in situations where roles are unclear or time is of the essence, democratic leadership can lead to communication failures and uncompleted projects

-Paternalistic: The relationship between these co-workers and leader are extremely solid, although like a parent would have to, sometimes the employer must spank the employee.

 -Laissez-faire: Laissez-faire leaders allow followers to have complete freedom to make decisions but it can sometimes result in a lack of productivity, cohesiveness, and satisfaction.

 -Transactional: Transactional leaders are effective on work team. On the other hand, the main disadvantage is that they are more concerned with following existing rules than with making changes to the organization.

 -Transformational: The main objective is to work to change or transform his or her followers' needs and redirect their thinking. In addition, transformational leadership can reform organizations.

With this activity, we have learned that there are many types of ways to guide a team. In addition, some of them are more effective than others and we have discovered that our type of organization (in The Little Ants) is democrative, we have got good things but like always we have to improve in other aspects of organizating our work. We have liked a sentence of one of our classmates: “a leader must form leaders, not followers”.

See you next week!

Facilitator's Post

Hi readers! I'm Esmeralda, the facilitator of this week. I have coordinated and evaluated the work of my group and this week has been special. We have studied the different types of leadership that a group could have and I have been trying some of them.

 Trying to do it in a good mood, I attempted to order some of my mates what they have to do and when they have to do it, I pressure them a bit and their response was a sense of nervousness, they were frustrated and worried of doing the task as fast as possible to avoid my scolding. This is typical of the authoritarian leadership and I proved that it was not a good way of working because it was difficult to maintain a healthy environment of work.

Regarding to that experiment, I decided that the most adequate way of working was the democratic type of leadership. So, I organized the group taking into account each member of the group. In the 6th of May, I divided the work among the members of the group: Mari, Alba and Rosana worked with the Wikipedia's document that Linda had previously uploaded, while Maria and Raquel, and Blanca and me worked with the other two documents in pairs.

During this weekend we continued working on that documents and in the 12th of May we created a Prezi for our stars in order to present the activity. So, in the 13th of May the presented the activity and they do it quite well!

As a facilitator I have to say that my role was easy because, after a long time working together we have learned to work in a cooperative way.

Moreover, I have to be in charge of the Web 2.0, so here you can see some of our tweets of this week: 

See you!