MM 30 Authoritarian Leadership

For centuries, leadership theory was based almost exclusively on warfare. Here, the leader was a highly educated, charismatic man who knew how to control and motivate his subordinates. This Great Man was supposedly born with leadership qualities. According to this theory, there were simply few predestined leaders and those who needed to be led.

It was only with Max Weber that this very limited view of leadership was abandoned. He devoted the last ten years of his life, from 1910 onward, to the sociology of power, in which he first presented leadership as a learnable skill and identified three types of leadership: autocratic, charismatic, and bureaucratic. Weber's groundwork paved the way for Kurt Lewin's behavioral leadership theory. In the 1930s, he tested his own three leadership styles on young people: authoritarian, cooperative, and laissez-faire.

Authoritarian leadership operates according to the top-down principle. Here, the lines are clearly drawn: The manager has absolute decision-making power, while employees are subject to unconditional obedience. The spectrum of authoritarian leadership ranges from dictatorship to the classic patriarch to the charismatic minstrel. If you like, any leadership style prior to Lewin could be classified as authoritarian. In general, the following attributes define the authoritarian leadership style:

-strict rules and tasks determine the work of the employees

-Relationship between management and employees does not matter

-the management has sole control over all information

-The task of leadership lies in delegation and control

-Management has sole decision-making power

-Employee needs are insignificant

-Employees' initiative is nonexistent or severely limited

-Insufficiently satisfactory performance of employees will be sanctioned

In the context of:

Q: Q01, Q02

E:

T: T01, T07