When a passenger plane crashes onto an unknown island and the survivors must risk their lives to stay alive is the background behind the TV show, "LOST." Each of the survivor's leadership ability develops over their time on the island. Below are just four of the characters and how they display a behavioral approach to leadership in Season 1, Episode1.

 

Dr. Jack Sheppard: The show's most prominent character and leader, spinal surgeon Dr. Jack Sheppard, has a very direct leadership style. He likes to be in control and displays an authoritarian leadership style to decision-making. When landing on the island he immediately takes control of the situation. He gathers a team of other survivors and initiates a plan to help a man from underneath the turbine of the plane. He inspects wounds and cares for any survivor seriously injured. He would make a great military leader as his presence under pressure is phenomenal. I believe that Jack is in-between a team leader and an authoritarian leader on Blake and Mouton's Managerial Grid. Jack is extremely task-oriented and delegates tasks well. For example, he assigns Hugo to care for Claire while she is having contractions. However, he displays a medium level of people-oriented behavior. For example, Jack tells someone doing CPR that they should give their license back and he then takes over the job of performing CPR. His action does not empower the individual who was only trying to save a life. On the other hand, later in the episode, Jack does show gratification and coaches Kate through her fear while she stitches his wound for him. Once he learns that the entire plane is not located where they are he devises a plan to get the radio transceiver from the cockpit of the plane. He is clear about his directions nd does not want many people to go along with maybe because he doubts their abilities, displaying a Theory X approach to leadership. 

 

Hugo "Hurley" Reyes: Hugo displays high relations-oriented behavior. He falls in the country club box of the managerial grid. Hugo after being directed to care for Claire, he sits next to her and makes sure she is okay and he brings her food. When the survivors get into an argument. Hugo stands up and reminds the group that this is a team and that they are all in this together. He recognizes that this behavior between the group will only cause more problems. Hugo tries to get to know each of the survivors individually and after caring for Claire he sits with Sayid and gets to know more about where he learned about technology. He is genuinely interested in learning about the other survivors.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Kate Austen: Kate follows orders and displays a participative leadership style. She does not necessarily stand up first, but she always wants to be involved with helping on the island. She supports the ideas of others including Sayid's ability to fix the transceiver. Kate also embodies a people-oriented behavior to leadership. She is an encourager, and it is revealed when she tells Charlie that he is not a coward. Kate learns to be a leader from Jack when she uses his "5 seconds of fear" model. She then displays a theory Y behavior to leadership in that she embodies self-control and exercises self-direction to save Jack when he is lost in the jungle.

 

James "Sawyer" Ford: Sawyer is not much of a leader but rather a slug or an impoverished leader. He is first seen sitting on the sand smoking as the chaos behind him explodes. He does not perform any task of helping any of the other survivors or mentoring the survivors through the crash. Instead, he starts a fight with Sayid. He believes that Sayid caused the plane crash due to his appearance as a Middle Easterner. Sawyer embodies a Theory X behavior to leadership doubting his group of survivors. He chooses security above everything else.