by Dr.Liew

Created on: October 25, 2008   Last Updated: October 26, 2009

Leadership by definition is the ability to influence a group of people toward the achievement of goals. As a leader, you have the responsibility and authority to make sure the group you are leading perform organizational tasks efficiently and effectively. Therefore, any error committed by the staff of the organization should be blamed on the leadership for the lack of supervision and control by the leader. Some might argue that collective accountability is a better choice for errors committed, or only the individual who has committed the error should be held responsible, but I feel that the one who should bear the most responsibility is the leader himself or herself. For example, a minister of a country might choose to resign over a major incident that occurred in that country.

A leader of an organization is a also a manager of that organization, so he or she should perform the basic tasks of planning, organizing, leading and controlling. If errors occurred in an organization, especially for repetitive types, it normally reflects on the weaknesses of the leadership, particularly in the controlling aspect. Control is the process of monitoring activities to ensure that they are being accomplished as planned and of correcting any significant deviations. According to Robbins S.P and Coulter. M(1999), there are basically three types of control systems, namely market control, bureaucratic control and clan control. Market control is an approach to design a control system that uses external market mechanisms such as profit and market share to establish the standards used in the control system. Under this system, if staff made errors resulting in organizational performance fell below the industrial standards, naturally the person who has designed the system, i.e the leader should be blamed because it might be due to the failure of this controlling system that caused the errors, or errors not corrected in an earlier stage.

The second approach, i.e the bureaucratic control that relies on administrative rules, regulations, procedures, policies, standardization of activities and other mechanisms to ensure the employees exhibit appropriate behaviours and meet performance standards. A leader who implement this type of control system should make sure that all rules, regulations, procedures and policies are strictly adhere to in performing organizational tasks in order to achieve organizational goals. Failure to do so will definitely lead to errors in tasks and duties execution

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