Lsi – Gm591 Leadership and Organization Behavior

LSI GM591 Leadership and Organization Behavior September 9, 2011 According to my LSI, my Primary personal thinking style is avoidance at 80% and my back-up personal thinking style is affiliative at 75%. I agree with my primary personal thinking style, avoidance and my back-up personal thinking style, affiliative. With the avoidance style, I can live life more positively and I can confront the people that cause my distress. With the affiliative style, I can acquire stronger interpersonal skills that will help form healthy relationships. Some of the statements about avoidance are true about me, while others aren’t.

Example of true statements are: having few strong interests, having difficulty making decisions, uncomfortable discussing feelings and self-doubting and self-blaming. Some of the false statements are: lacking initiative, having difficulty establishing relationships, preoccupied with my own concerns, recently experienced something traumatic and feeling overwhelmed by circumstances. If you tally the true and false statements up, then you would see that I have more false statements than true ones, which tells me that I am less avoidance-oriented now.

However, if you look at the definition of avoidance, as avoiding situations that may cause distress, then I would be a more avoidance-oriented person. When I get upset with a friend or family member, then I tend to shut down completely and avoid them for a few days till I am able to discuss what is wrong with me. I also agree with the affiliative style being my back-up personal thinking style because I don’t have a hard time meeting people, I don’t lack effectiveness at work, I don’t avoid group activities, I am able to relax around people and I don’t feel unimportant or disliked.

I might feel lonely sometimes, but everyone does at one point or another. Being in the affiliative style benefits me with being liked and feeling a sense of belonging. I would identify achievement as limiting personal thinking style because it was my lowest scoring percentile at 21%. Being achievement-oriented involves recognizing where your efforts make a difference, deciding on a desired outcome, and setting specific goals to help you accomplish it. I would say that my achievement style is lowered because I feel like my efforts makes little differences, I on’t set goals, and I lack interest. However, I don’t lack initiative at work, I take responsibility for my actions and I don’t blame other people for my problems. In school I don’t do homework to achieve or excel, I just do it to get it done and hopefully pass. My dependent, approval, and conventional personal thinking styles all being at 69% percentile could be preventing me from being an achiever. For me to become more achievement-oriented I need to start pleasing myself and stop focusing on what I think I should be doing and instead do what is important to me.

I am not a manager yet, but I am pursuing that degree and field now. After reviewing my LSI and learning what it all means, I am going to have a hard time achieving a manager type persona. I think that a manager needs to be encouraging and have a high percentile in the humanistic-encouraging style and mine is only at 25%. I am not uncomfortable with interacting with others, nor do I lack close relationships, nor do I have a problem working in groups. However, I do have a difficult time communicating in terms of speaking in public and telling people what do to or how to do something.

Improving my humanistic-encouraging style will improve my ability to lead, manage and teach. Looking back now, it’s weird to see some connections with my growing up strategies with certain personal thinking styles. I remember my mom never making me do any homework or bribing me with rewards if I got all A’s or anything like that, so I have a feeling that had an affect on why I don’t feel a big need to be more achievement-oriented. When my mom got upset with my brother, and me she would just run to her room and I guess, “avoid” us. So, now when I am upset with a friend, I “run” away and let it just pass by.

My mom was always encouraging me to do things and always said that I can do whatever I put my mind to, so I don’t know why my encouraging style is in the lower percentile. I have learned a lot about myself while taking and reviewing my LSI results. This exercise made me aware of knew things about myself, while letting me admit to myself some other things. For example, I had a feeling I had avoidance problems, but taking this survey and it finding out that information made me think that it is actually real and hurting me more than I thought. I would love to improve my avoidance personal thinking style.