With more
chances of working together with many people, there is an ongoing debate over
whether or not being a leader is better than being a follower. I agree with
this statement because leaders can be more motivated to aggressively take part
in a group work than followers and have a chance to develop a sense of
responsibility.
To
begin with, leaders can get more motivation to participate in a group work
eagerly than followers. One significant reason is that in most teamwork, leaders
tend to make a final decision which will become the goal of the work. Since
this aim is what leaders want and expect, it becomes a good motivation for leaders
to work more aggressively than others. For example, couple of months ago, I did
a group project about recent financial crisis with three members. I suggested
limiting the scope of our project to Korea and all my members agreed with this
idea. Since the topic was what I had long been interested in, I was able to
enjoy working and stayed up several nights in order to reach a satisfactory
result. In the end, we finished our report before the deadline and my team finally
received the best grade in all groups in the economics course. This reveals
that by being a leader, one can be encouraged to participate in more eagerly than
followers when working in teams.
In
addition, leaders can have more opportunity to build up a sense of responsibility
than followers. This is because as a representative person, the role of leaders
requires more responsibilities than followers. In most teamwork, the role of
leaders include many works such as, assigning proper tasks to each members,
scheduling a group meeting and monitoring members. Such tasks require a strong
sense of responsibility accordingly, by taking a leader, one can cultivate his
or her sense of responsibility. For instance, when I was doing the project
explained above, I always arrived at the group meeting earlier than others, led
all discussion and checked what each members had done many times. Even though
such tasks made me feel burdened and arduous, I’m sure that this experience of
being a leader allowed me to have stronger sense of responsibility.
In
conclusion, I firmly believe that being a leader is more beneficial than being
a follower. This is because, not only get leaders more motivation to work hard
than followers, but also leaders can take more responsibility for their works.
All in all, being a leader makes us feel uncomfortable. However, I’m definitely
sure that the experience of being a leader will be valuable possessions when we
work in teams with many people from different backgrounds and different fields. |