Leadership Styles - which is best?

How many different leadership styles are there?

40? Here is the list so far...

Agile, Adaptive, Achievement -orientated, Affiliative, Authentic, Autocratic, Bureaucratic, Change, Charismatic, Coaching-style, Commanding, Cross-cultural, Collaborative, Contextual, Complexity, Collective, Delegative, Democratic, Directive, Distributive, Ethical, Empowering, Entrepreneurial, Feminist, Inclusive, Laissez faire, Leader Member Exchange, Moral, Neuro, Network, Pacesetting, Participative, Servant, Strategic, Supportive, Systems, Transactional, Transformational, Visionary, Value-based

Have I missed any?

Redundant Leadership

In this post on spotting dodgy concepts I suggested that concepts need to uniquely and clearly defined.?If they are not, it creates confusion and narrows our understanding.

For me, having nearly 40 different types or styles of leadership begs the question

“Is there an upper limit on the number of leadership styles?”?

The more leadership styles there are, the more likely there is overlap with existing styles such as transformational leadership.?This creates ‘construct redundancy’ where ‘new’ leadership styles are just old leadership styles in new bottles.

In this post I explored George Box’s statement

“all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful.”?

In leadership the questions is not so much whether new concepts are ‘wrong’ but whether they bring anything to the party.

Ultimately if there are no boundaries there is nothing or just one 'thing'. If we have an infinite number leadership styles (or maybe at least one for every letter in the alphabet - prizes for ones beginning with 'Z';) then we just end up back where we started with a ‘thing’ called ‘leadership’.?

For some ‘thing’ to be meaningful we need to be able to differentiate it from another ‘thing’ .

But the number of leadership styles seems to be on the increase.?

Between 1980 – 2003 the number of publications relating to either authentic or servant leadership alone was around 3,000.?From 2003-2016?this number increased by 10X to 30,000!

Consolidating Leadership

One of the reasons for studying leadership must be to distinctly categorise different leadership styles?

Julia Hoch (Associate Professor at California State University) did just that.?In 2018 she and others examined over 300 studies related to ethical, servant, authentic and transformational leadership and found

“that authentic and ethical leadership display significant construct redundancy as evidenced by their high correlations with transformational leadership”.

Other studies have tried to understand the relationship between different types of leadership.?For example this study tries to distinguish between Ethical, Authentic & Servant Leadership. And this study tries to give more rigour to the concept of servant leadership which Hoch found might add something to the leadership pot over transformational leadership.

Feminist Leadership

Organisations such as Action Aid have adopted a Feminist Leadership approach. This suggests that women have a different leadership style than men. This study supports that view - women adopt a more democratic or participative style while men are more autocratic & directive. But this study challenges these gender stereotypes suggesting the claims are inflated. While this study states

"leadership style on which women exceeded men relate positively to leaders’ effectiveness whereas all of the aspects on which men exceeded women have negative or null relations to effectiveness".

This study also suggests that US states women governors had fewer COVID-19 deaths than those led by men.

So maybe women are just better leaders? But the gender differences are small.

Regardless of gender, we can say that leaders who are passive and lead by exception are less effective than proactive leaders - but that shouldn't come as a surprise otherwise what is the point in a leader (or male leaders ;)

Contextual, Complexity, System, Place etc. Leadership

For successful organisational change evidence suggests that leaders need to exhibit both transactional and transformation leadership styles but these effects are probably mediated by trust.

If adopting multiple leadership styles is beneficial to organisational change, how do we know which one to adopt when?

Maybe this why an emerging trend in leadership thinking seems to be ‘contextual’ leadership (leadership of place). A recent literature review sees a

“push from the literature to look beyond individual qualities of leaders and acknowledge the importance of the context and systems within which they operate”

DIY Leadership - a way forward?

Dennis Tourish (Professor of Leadership and Organization Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London) in his book ‘Management Studies in Crisis’ explores how leadership theories are developed.?Starting with "some positive-sounding adjective that you can place in front of the word ‘leadership’" and through a process of creating tautological claims ‘e.g. authentic leaders are authentic’, testing them and ending with a ‘new’ construct.?

This is very similar to the process of creating other fads and fashions in organisational change

Are all leadership theories are flawed? This tour de force by John Antonakis (professor of organizational behavior at the Faculty of Business and Economics of the University of Lausanne and current editor-in-chief of The Leadership Quarterly) suggests improvements in leadership studies could be made by taking the following steps:

1. conceive of and describe a construct, its different states and forms
2. explain how the construct is affected or can affect other constructs, whether causally or in a process
3. identify how the system of relations is bounded by space or time
4. demonstrate how the studied phenomenon can solve problems
5. build an explanatory bridge of this phenomenon to another discipline

So maybe we should try DIY leadership? Defined as:

“Any positive adjective describing a leadership behaviour chosen by the leader & followers that drives outcomes in a particular time and space (context)”?

This way organisations and teams can discuss (based on the evidence) and agree behaviours they want to see from their leaders that will help solve specific problems. This could be a generative dialogue where leaders meet with employees to discuss the success of the behaviours they have adopted and employees can give feedback on what they thought worked compared to other behaviours.

This would build a context specific evidence base of what behaviours work (or doesn't) in which contexts creating a clear definition of what effective leadership looks like and how it drives desired outcomes in that organisation.

All we need are some quotes, a company to test this out before we can proclaim a new construct ??