Kurt Lewin: Three Types Of Leadership Decisions

Kurt Lewin

Kurt Lewin and his colleagues did an experiment in 1939 on leadership decisions and identified three different styles of leadership. These three styles, mentioned below revolve around decision making.

1. AUTOCRATIC

An autocratic leader takes decisions without consulting others in the team. This causes the highest level of discontent in his sub-ordinates. This style of leadership works when there is no need for input for the decision to be made. The motivation of the people is unruffled irrespective of being involved or not involved in decision – making to carry out subsequent tasks/actions.

2. DEMOCRATIC

A democratic leader involves the people in the process of decision-making. Although the final decision to be taken depends on

Laissez – Faire works best when people are capable and motivated in making their own decisions, and where the requirement for a central coordination is nil or close to nil.

After identifying the above mentioned theories, we followed the KURT LEWIN theory of leadership as it is most widely used and covers the broad range of leadership styles.

Item Writing/ Test Construction

After going through the literature review, item writing was done for the desired test. Initially a set of 24 items were made - eight statements each corresponding to a particular leadership style was penned down. Following is the list of these 24 items:

1. The final decision making in my team is mostly done by me

2. I try to take in account opinions of one or more employees while taking a decision

3. I use majority voting as a method of taking an important decision

4. Consulting others can be time consuming, so I prefer not taking opinions of my team members while taking a decision

5. I appreciate varied ideas and inputs coming from my team members for an upcoming

Validity analysis is either done to check for internal validity or external validity. There are many ways to measure validity. For this particular test we used factor analysis to determine the validity.

Factor analysis

A Varimax Rotation was performed to check for correlation between variables and the factor. The following results were obtained from the test. Figure 4: Rotated Component Matrix Response Analysis

Additionally, the responses were also analyzed to determine the type of leadership style that was exhibited by various people. The response for each person was segregated according to the three styles i.e., Democratic, Autocratic and Laissez Faire. Average of the response score for each style per person was calculated and based on the highest average score; the leadership style of each person was assessed. Figure 5: Response Analysis

The responses received can be tabulated as below. Out of the 51 people who responded, majority people follow ‘Democratic’ leadership style. References

https://www.statsoft.com/Textbook/Reliability-and-Item-Analysis