Lord of the Flies

Introduction: Our film was "Lord of the Flies". In this film a group of young boys from a military school survive a plane crash in the middle of the ocean and are stranded on a deserted island with no adults. We will explore the leadership, roles, conflict, problem solving, and group development found within this group.

I will be starting by discussing the different styles of leadership in this film. We will take a look at the different types of leadership and the power that drives them, along with some examples from the movie.

In every group, there are always certain individuals with better qualities to be a leader than others. Although the strongest people in a group may have a very big influence on the group as a whole, they are not always the best choice to lead the group. Lord of the Flies is a perfect example of this.

There are several types of leadership, but the two most evident in this film are autocratic or sometimes called authoritarian and democratic. We will first take a look at the Democratic style of leadership. Our book defines a democratic leader as a group leader who stimulates the involvement of group members and encourages them to arrive at decisions through the process of consensus.

At the beginning of the film one of the older boys, Ralph, takes charge and realizes that the boys need some kind of order and sets some ground rules. We are going to take a look at a clip that shows Ralph's democratic style of leadership right from the start. At the end of this clip you will see that he becomes the designated leader by anonymous decision since he was the highest ranked of all the boys. (Show clip #1) So as you can see, Ralph demonstrates a democratic style of leadership by saying that it doesn't matter if he is the leader, and stresses that they all must work together. As a democratic leader Ralph demonstrates two types of power. The first is legitimate power. Since he was actually elected the leader he automatically will receive some power to call meetings and decide what the priorities of the group should be. He also seems to be a well-liked individual since no one protested his being the designated leader. Being well-liked also provided Ralph with some referent power. Referent power is the influence that people have by those who we are attracted to or admire. Since Ralph was the highest ranked boy there, there was a certain level of referent power shown.

As the film