Leadership and Decision Making in Groups and Teams

The role of the leader in a group is to direct and influence. In groups, there always seems to be someone who steps up to be the leader, whether it be to assign the other group members tasks or to control the flow of tasks. There are four decision-making styles that leaders usually have: authoritarian, consultative, participative, and laissez-faire. Authoritarian leaders take control without any decisions from the other group members. Consultative leaders make the other group members believe that their input is taken into account before the leader makes their own decision in the end. Participative leaders make sure that they involve other group members and they come up with a decision together. Laissez-faire leaders, or "hands off" approach, don't really do anything, they just go with the flow and do the task. I think that the most common leadership is the participative leader. Well, in most of the groups I'm in, there is a participative leader. What I don't like sometimes is the consultative leader. I know that they're trying to test the waters and getting other people's opinions first, but in the end they're just making the decision on their own, which I think is kind of selfish. Just like when you're doing a group project, someone has to step up to be the leader or else it will be chaos and everyone will do their own thing and no one will know what their role is.