From what I noticed for most of the events that I engaged, our leadership style was the same, which was democratic style. A democratic leader is the one “who encourages group discussion and decision making through consensus building” (Kendall, 2015, p. 167). Before we started doing anything, we usually voted for each idea. The idea that got more votes for it, we would choose that as a primary one and the one that came in second place would be our backup plan. Our leadership functions usually depend on whether he or she is a formal or an informal leader. The formal leader has a job to organize and direct group members to meet the goals of the organization or team, which leads them to have instrumental leadership. For example, that would be the manager of our smaller branch of the organization. In contrast, the informal leader is someone who does not have the official authority to direct the group. Despite this, the group chooses to follow the lead of this person. The informal leader may arise because he or she is easy to talk with and may provide emotional support for members. In this case, it could be any people in our group who always knew how to cheer people up and said “good work” no matters what. Since we used votes to get everyone consensus building on choosing ideas, there were few individual members privately believed that was unwise and often limited/withheld their opinions. They stopped contributing …show more content…
The first characteristic in the bureaucracy is the division of labor, which means that each member has highly specialized tasks to fulfill. In my organization, since we are just a smaller branch of The Red Cross Society of Vietnam, each member does have their own task to fulfill, but it is not highly specialized. We have people schedule for events, voluntary doctors and nurses, leader, event coordinator, people who look for philanthropists/sponsors/donors, etc. The second characteristic is hierarchy of authority, which means the power structure and authority that increases at higher levels in the hierarchy. In my group, we all vote for what we want, so we don’t have that kind of ultimate power to make final decisions in all matters. The third on would be rules and regulations which “offer clear-cut standards for determining satisfactory performance so that each new member does not have to reinvent the rules” (Kendall, 2015, p. 172). I think we do have some kinds of rules and regulations, but I just don’t know since I didn’t volunteer in the office as much as I volunteered outside. The fourth one will be the employment based on technical qualifications. Most of people that I knew in the group were volunteers and only some of them (the ones who work in the office) either worked full-time or part-time. Due to that, I