Advantages of Mixed leadership styles

     A leadership style refers to a set of behaviors that help you effectively motivate, direct, and manage a group of people.  Mixed management refers to a combination of management styles  and seeks to combine  the positive aspects of each leadership style to run the organization successfully. There are many leadership styles one can choose from, and more than one may fit one’s needshe different theories of educational leadership express our differences in our institutions and need for varied leadership (Bush and Glover,2014).The paradox is finding which management styles can work for you and your organization and which are not well suited. Organizations are made up of different kinds of people who respond to different to different styles of leadership. With recent reviews in educational leadership theories, many alternative and competing models have been contextualized(Leithwood et al,1999). Combining  two or more styles ensures leaders  bring on board everyone within the organization. Thus, there is more commitment to the organization which results to employees being more enthusiastic about their work.

In any organization, there are different personalities to manage in any  team, which makes a one type of leadership style. In an article for  Very well Mind, three leadership styles were first identified in (1939) by a group of psychological research. They included: authoritarian (autocratic),participative (democratic) and deligative (laissez-faire). It is important to note that the most successful approaches are a mix of the styles, meaning that different leadership styles suit different situations.

But since the study was conducted in 1939, there have been many additional leadership patterns .These approaches differ in how involved the leader is in the daily running of an organization and how well they support the human resource. For instance, the transformational leader-often cited as the most effective management style,( Burns,1978) prefer to engage staff by laying out a vision for their organization's future successes and challenges. This inspires the whole team greatly as each person feels they belong. On the other hand, transactional leadership defines the employee-employer relationship as an exchange of effort for monetary compensation(Burns,1978). While it may not inspire your team as much as the transformational style, it does clearly define everyone's roles and expectations. This way the expected outcome is known for all parties .This leader reiterates that at the end of the day, employees come to work to work and that a paycheck is an even exchange for hard, precise efforts. But ,mixed with a bit of transformational leadership, workers may not feel as if the are “being used”, but also that they belong. So combining the two styles would be of great benefit to an organization.

Another example is a combination of instructional and distributive leadership styles. Instructional leadership is directly related with learning process and leaders held responsible to serve as instructional leaders in their institutions(Safeek and Nawastheen ,2016).On the other hand, distributive leadership style advocates for shared responsibility and each member leads from where they are(Harrison ,2004). Combining the two would be be very advantageous because a leader is held responsible and the others get to share in leadership such that none feels to much patronized or controlling; and all parties share in wins and down falls

In summary, there isn't one right or wrong leadership style for an organization. A good measure of any leader’s success  will come down to self-assessment and  willingness to pick and choose leadership styles that suit them and their organizations best.