What Is the Difference Between Assigned Leadership & Emergent Leadership?

When your small business grows, you will need leaders other than yourself. You can look among your current employees for anyone who displays leadership qualities. These are emergent leaders. You can search among job seekers for people to hire for leadership positions. These are assigned leaders. These two types of leaders can have different styles and different effects on your employees.

Assigned Leadership

Assigned leaders derive their authority from their positions in the company hierarchy. The titles you give them carry weight with the employees they lead and you expect employees to show respect for the position. Eventually, however, employees must come to respect the person. The assigned leader must demonstrate wisdom, problem-solving skills and the ability to motivate employees in order to maintain a position of leadership and justify the assignment.

Emergent Leadership

When an employee begins taking on tasks voluntarily, helping others complete their tasks better and encouraging consensus among coworkers, this person is an emergent leader. This type of leadership is distinguished by the leader proving herself before being formally given a leadership title. Emergent leaders offer you the advantage of knowing in advance of a promotion that the person can handle the job. This type of leadership can also garner the leader respect among employees who know that the leader has shown the ability to work hard. Employees may expect emergent leadership to demonstrate more empathy for the worker than assigned leadership.

Perception vs. Reality

Employees may perceive that assigned leaders are educated, intelligent and wise, even if they are not. This is because workers assume that you as the owner performed some kind of screening process and found the best person for the job. This kind of automatic authority has its pitfalls. If your assigned leader has areas in which he is incompetent, employees can begin to resent having to follow such a person. Similarly, an emergent leader may cause resentment if she has to make decisions that help the company instead of employees. For example, an emergent leader may come out against employee raises based on a review of company finances. Employees can feel betrayed by an emergent leader, even though the reality is the leader may be making wise decisions.

Two Leaders in Conflict

On occasion, you may have an assigned leader in a department when the actual leader is an employee under that person. The emergent leader may have the ability to encourage cooperation and consensus in a way that the assigned leader does not. The problem can become counterproductive if the emergent leader defies the assigned leader when they have different approaches or solutions to problems. At that point, you may have to reassign one or both people.