Find salaries. Upload your resume. Sign in. Career Development. This article has been approved by an Indeed Career Coach Understanding theories and styles of leadership can help you be more effective in your role, particularly if your position requires frequent collaboration with or management of others.
What are leadership theory and leadership style? Personality traits Actions Environment Situation Decision-making process How input is received How relationships are maintained.
Coach: Recognizes strengths and weaknesses, helps people set goals and provides a lot of feedback. Visionary: Manages through inspiration and confidence. Servant: Focuses on helping team members feel fulfilled.
Autocratic or authoritarian: Makes decisions with little or no input from others. Laissez-faire or hands-off: Delegates tasks and provides little supervision. Democratic: Considers the opinions of others before making a decision. Pacesetter: Sets high standards and focuses on performance. Bureaucratic: Follows a strict hierarchy and expects team members to follow procedure. Six main leadership theories. The great man theory.
The trait theory. The behavioral theory. The transactional theory or management theory. The transformational theory or relationship theory. The situational theory. Image description Common leadership styles: 1. Why you should identify your leadership theory and style.
Related View More arrow right. The behavioral leadership theory focuses on how leaders behave, and assumes that these traits can be copied by other leaders. Behavioral theories of leadership focus heavily on the actions of a leader—this theory suggests that the best predictor of leadership success is viewing how a leader acts.
Action rather than qualities are the focal points of behavioral learning theory. Some of the styles of leadership include task-oriented leaders, people-oriented leaders, country club leaders, status-quo leaders, dictatorial leaders, and more. At the end of the day, the actions and actual behaviors of a leader are what defines success in this theory.
The behavioral theory has many advantages, primarily that leaders can learn and decide what actions they want to implement to become the kind of leader they want to be.
It allows leaders to be flexible and adapt based on their circumstances. Another great benefit of this leadership style is that it suggests anyone is capable of becoming a leader.
A great example of the behavioral theory is looking at a task-oriented leader vs. A people-oriented leader will look at the individuals and go right to them, asking what the issue is.
Whatever behaviors you choose, the behavioral leadership theory helps leaders focus on their actions and utilize their decisions to be a great leader. The contingency leadership theory, sometimes called situational theory, focuses on the context of a leader. These theories look at the situational effects of the success or failure or a leader. This theory takes the specific leadership styles and suggests that good leaders can adjust their leadership style situationally.
It also suggests that it may be best to find the right kind of leader for a specific situation. The contingency theory has great advantages, including that leaders are able to be effective no matter their situational context.
Contingency theory focuses on the importance of a situation, but may not focus enough on the psychology of the employees or the company itself. It also may not focus enough on how leadership styles can change over time. There are internal and external factors that impact a leader and their situation. The type of company, the size of the team, and the innate leadership style of an individual are internal factors.
External factors may include the customer feelings and the marketplace. All of these situations play a factor into the contingency theory.
The great man theory of leadership, sometimes called the trait theory, suggests that good leaders are born.
The trait theory suggests that leaders deserve to be in their position because of their special traits. This suggests that social or psychological leaders are predetermined and that leaders are unable to come from the shadows—they are either chosen or not.
There is also criticism that most of the traits associated with this theory are inherently masculine, and don't match the real psychology of good leaders. These social giants utilized their skills to lead nations. High levels of ambition and determination are usually seen in leaders that appear to bring this theory to life. So it may appear that leaders get to their position based on their inherit gifts.
The management theory is sometimes called transactional leadership, and focuses on supervision, organization, and group performance. Transactional leadership is a system of rewards and punishments, and transactional leadership is regularly used in business.
When employees do something successful, managers reward them. When they fail, they may get punished. Transactional rewards and punishments are given based on the idea that people really only do things for the reward. Their psychology doesn't allow human beings to do things out of goodness, but rather out of the promise of a reward. The management leadership style can be extremely effective.
Positive reinforcement is known for working wonders with employees, encouraging and motivating them to succeed.
But there is lots of criticism around leadership that is strictly transactional as well. Early leadership models evolved away from a primary focus on trait theories toward behavioral theories of leadership. Companies and researchers wanted to know what leaders do in addition to who they are or how they appeared to others.
They asked, what are the key behaviors that can be observed in successful leaders? This focus on leadership behaviors coincided with the recognition that not all effective leadership behaviors are a result of genetic dispositions instilled at birth, but instead leadership behaviors might be developed based on experience and training.
Organizational training programs began to emerge in an attempt to assist managers become better leaders. Thus was born an era of leadership studies focused on behavioral theories. As our understanding of leadership became more sophisticated, companies and researchers observed that different situations called for different leaders. No single leadership style, list of traits, or set of behaviors seemed to work best for every situation or context.
Military contexts appeared to require different leaders than political or organizational contexts. Researchers realized that what made a great leader in a certain setting was contingent upon the specific situation and the circumstances surrounding the followers. Studies of situational leadership tended to focus on key factors such as the nature of the leader, the nature of the followers, and the nature of the tasks.
Thus was born an era of contingency leadership theories that attempted to explain why certain leaders succeeded better in certain contexts and situations. In general, our understanding of what makes a great leader has evolved from leader-focused studies to follower-focused studies. Early studies did not emphasize the relationships between the leader and the followers, nor the impact of the context and followers upon the leader.
Most recently, research on leadership effectiveness has focused on the characteristics of the followers rather than just the characteristics of the leader.
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