Affiliative Leadership Style

1 IntroductionN

OWADAYS, supported by fast development of communication technologies and by needs of different types of businesses, number of distributed teams are increasing among all industries, especially software development.

Term distributed teams or virtual teams in this paper used to refer to the teams where members are not physically located in the same place. Also, term virtual is used to refer non-personal communication, using e-mail, instant messaging, audio and video calls.

Distributed teams are complex and multi-dimensional in terms of configuration and distance. Configuration refers to the arrangement of team members across sites while distance relates to aspects of team member separation. As a result of variations in configuration

The main purpose of affiliative leader is to keep employees happy, and he values their emotions and happiness more than completing tasks and reaching goals. This kind of leader build strong emotional relations between employees and manages by using these relations. He also relies on loyalty very much.

The main benefit of this leadership style is significant increasing in communications. When employees are friends to each other they communicate much better, help each other and share ideas easily. Also there is positive impact on flexibility, employees and leader trust each other more which motivates them to bring more interesting and risky ideas.

The other positive side of affiliative leadership is more frequent and valuable feedback. In general, employees rarely receive feedback outside annual performance reviews, or receive only negative feedback. Affiliative leader talks to his team more often, and more likely to bring positive feedback, which has very significant positive effect on team morale, and motivation and performance of

Democratic leader, before making an important decision, typically ask employees what they think about the problem and making final decision taking their feedback into account.

This approach brings number of benefits. First, it builds trust between leader and team. People like when their opinion on important issues that concern them taken into account. Even in case of negative result they don’t feel angry and understand the reasons of difficult decision. Second, democratic leadership increase employees’ commitment significantly. When people know that their opinion will be heard they much more likely to come up with creative solutions, which can more effective than existing solutions.

However, democratic style has some disadvantages. Because it needs to communicate with team a lot amount of meeting and duration of each meeting can be dramatically increased, which in its turn, will have negative impact on performance and motivation. Also possible misuse of this style is trying to use it to avoid responsibility for tough decision. When leader trying to move his responsibility to other team members or just trying to avoid taking any decision it can also reduce team morale and