Advantages And Disadvantyages Of Functional Leadership (Research Paper Sample)

FUNCTIONAL LEADERSHIP
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Course
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Functional Leadership
Functional leadership is whereby a people who can lead specialize in that management and lead functional groups. This is the most common method used in most of the companies and institutions. It is the simplest and also effective especially when the general managers are very much occupied. The functional leadership has a good and a wrong side of it. The following are some of its advantages and disadvantages. One of its strength is that employees are not required to report to multiple leaders during their work as there are functional leaders. This helps in saving a lot of time that is used to do another job in the company. Dealing with one manager also decreases the communication channels that is, the employees do not require to make a lot of calls or pass the information through many people to reach. The employee just reports to the functional manager directly and openly. Also, the functional leadership makes the operation faster especially in companies where there is a lot of employees who are working there. This enhances a good flow of the work and efficient thus the company grows at a very big rate. Functional leadership is a way of improving communication channels in the organization.
Having functional leadership also makes the task of directing the work to appropriate employees easier. It is all because of having a direct manager. The functional manager has all the time to allocate the work to the people who have specialized on what the manager also has specialized. Human resource allocation is one of the critical activities that companies focus on; functional leadership has direct contact with the human capital hence it makes it easy for efficient distribution of employees. They also give recommendations when they have excess or fewer workers. It ensures that there is no doubling of assignment which makes the employees end up doing jobs that they are not supposed to do or the one that has been done by other people. This is avoided when the leadership is functional, and the employees have also been specialized. The functional leadership ensures a very good and healthy competition within an organization. The production of each worker can easily be monitored by functional leaders.This happens especially when it is a company that has many departments which have different managers. This competition arises when every manager wants to emerge as the best together with the employees. If it’s, for example, a school which has a department for discipline, the school came up with a group of leaders who will work under discipline department and will ensure that it is the best compared to others.
Functional leadership also enables the leaders working functionally to come up with new ideas. Those leaders with the same experience and knowledge when working together they share expertise and come up with new skills and tactics. This enables the company or organizations that practice functional organization to grow and expand very fast compared to one without it. All this makes functional leadership look better and more preferable to exercise institutions and companies. Functional leadership also enhances efficiency in the work. When a group of leaders who have specialized in one thing is working together, the workflows very well and even the end product of the work is admirable. This is because of the teamwork and the similarity which enables them to accomplish more. It is the best idea to apply to a company or organization.
Though the method of functional leadership has the advantages, it also has its disadvantages. They include the following when a company has a functional leader who assigns jobs to the employees directly meaning that there will be no interaction between the employees who have specialized in another area. This weakens the bond between the members of which its very bad as it can lead to the downfall of the company anytime. A particular group of specialist finds themselves isolated thus breaking the common bond. Having functional leaders also brings out a lack of coordination where needed. Due to lack of communication, a particular functional group may fail and break down because the leaders do not have any way of communicating their needs and issues with each other. In some cases, you find that the managers if they have been informed of an individual problem from a certain functional group then don’t take a quick response or they even fail to respond helpfully. All this is because they assume that it’s not their problem. This brings out a lot of delay such that, the time they are cooperating, the moment that cooperation could have worked out the best have already passed. This leads to a downfall.
Functional leadership also leads to the rise of disputes in the organizations. This comes up most during the meetings of all the members. When the group leaders are presenting their grievances of may be the condition of their offices and salary to the boss, they mobilize their people, and they all start rising against each other. It worsens when some g...