Closing the leadership gaps: Preferred and perceived leadership style among life insurance agents

The success of an insurance organization is very much tied to the effectivenes s of leaders of the insurance companies in managing their human capital. Insurance leaders and managers are constantly challenged to do their utmost to improve their leaders hip styles in order to push performances forward, especially during these turbulent economic times. Often, insurance leaders try to carry out various leadership styles assuming that their salespeople are accepting of them. However, the gap between an insurance salesperson's leadership preferences and perceptions could exist. Based on this assumption, this research aspires to find out the leadership gap between an insurance salesperson's preferred leadership style and leadership styles portrayed by insurance leaders as perceived by insurance s alespeople, according to the Full-Range Leadership Theory. The identified gap will then be applied into a Preferred-Perceived Analysis (PPA) matrix [adapted from the Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA) matrix] to provide recommendations and suggestions for insurance industry practitioners. Three hundred and three usable samples of insurance agents were drawn randomly from four major insurance companies in Malaysia. The findings suggested that, generally, there were indeed differences between the preferred and perceived leaders hip styles based on all nine Full-Range Leadership factors and attributes.