Question

Describe a situation in which you applied this affiliative leadership style in your personal or professional life in order to manage change

Answer 1

This type of leadership focuses to bring harmony and resolves conflicts, by building team to develop connectivity and communication with each other and animosity is eliminated. the affiliative style of leadership was implemented in a scenario, when I was leading a project to bring a change from manual to automated system of operations in the factory. It was a change management process and it had huge level of curiosity, confusion and different views among the employees. In this scenario, My first action was to form change volunteers and form their team. The work of the change volunteers was to spread real and actual information about the change and how it can benefit the employees and the organization both. The team members worked on the benefits and issues of the change and tried to help fellow employees get relaxed and confident about the change process. The second action was to counsel and direct communicate with the employees to ease their worries, anxieties and tension to motivate them positively. It also made to resolve the conflict and made them change volunteers. It made a positive impact upon the employees and in some time, employees became confident and became cooperative to facilitate change. The third action was to start training programs for the employees who were to work on this new changed system of operations. It also eliminated conflict as employees now understood the work being done and became positively motivated. So, all these actions worked to eliminated conflict, build proper communication & connectivity and form teams at different level to develop regular interaction. It prevented any form of negative motivation and employees helped to facilitate the change.

So, in this scenario, change process was implemented using affiliative style of leadership.