What Are Leadership Styles
Leadership Styles - Are They Helpful In Leadership Development?
The term "styles" has become more prominent in popular culture over the last decades, but its origins lie in psychological research on learning and personality. The original concept of style is that we all have preferences for the WAY we do things -- think, relate to others, interact, learn. Most "styles approaches" suggest that styles are preferences, and that they can be changed, since they are not fixed. That may or may not be true, since some ideas about styles approach them as akin to fixed personality traits.
It's not surprising that style concepts have been applied to leadership. Blake and Mouton created styles based on a matrix using people versus task balances. Kurt Lewin, in the 1930's identified three major styles -- autocratic, democratic, and laissez faire, while Rensis Likert defined Exploitive authoritative, Benevolent authoritative, Consultative, and Participative.
More recently Daniel Goleman threw his hat in the ring of leadership styles, defining six emotional styles (consistent with his work on Emotional Intelligence), as follows:
- The Visionary Leader
- The Coaching Leader
- The Affiliative Leader
- The Democratic Leader
- The Pace-setting Leader
- The Commanding Leader
The Value of Leadership Styles Concepts
Leadership style concepts may be valuable in identifying strengths and weaknesses of current and future leaders, and leadershp style inventories and assessments are available. They can also be used to identify what kind of leader is needed for a particular organization at a particular time and assist in choosing someone who has the desired leadership approach. Finally, they can be useful in increasing a leader's self-awareness of his or her own leadership preferences and approaches for the purpose of self development.
Caution
It's essential that we keep in mind that any styles approach is just an arbitrary way to cut up our realities and experience and CATEGORIZE and LABEL people. While they may be useful in increasing self-awareness of leadership approaches, care should be taken to realize that they are labels, and not real things. When leadership styles are used to improve understanding and communication about leadership they have value. When used to label people they often can be destructive.