Which of the following leadership styles describes a leader who provides little direction or support?

There are 7 primary leadership styles and each has its place in a leader's toolkit. Depending on the situation, wise leaders know how and when to flex from one style to another.

On a continuum, leadership styles range from autocratic at one end, to laissez-faire at the other, with a variety of styles in between.

Hopefully this list will help you differentiate between the different styles and know when to apply them. Which style is your default? And which do you need to practice?

The seven primary leadership styles are: (1) Autocratic, (2) Authoritative, (3) Pace-Setting, (4) Democratic, (5) Coaching, (6) Affiliative, (7) Laissez-faire.

1. Autocratic Style

"Do as I say"

Generally, an autocratic leader believes that he or she knows more than others. They make all the decisions with little input from team members.

This command-and-control approach is typical of the past and doesn't hold much water with today's talent.

The style may still be appropriate in certain situations. For example, you can dip into an autocratic leadership style when crucial decisions need to be made on the spot, and you have the most knowledge about the situation. It also works when you're dealing with inexperienced and new team members and there's no time to wait for team members to gain familiarity with their role.

2. Authoritative Style

"Visionary" - "Follow Me"

The authoritative leadership style is the mark of confident leaders who map the way and set expectations, while engaging and energizing followers along the way.

In a climate of uncertainty, these leaders lift the fog for people. They help them see where the company is going and what's going to happen when they get there.

Unlike autocratic leaders, authoritative leaders take the time to explain their thinking: They don't just issue orders. Most of all, they allow people's input on how to achieve common goals.

3. Pace-Setting Style

"Do as I do!"

This style describes a very driven leader who sets the pace as in racing. Pacesetters set the bar high and push their team members to run hard and fast to the finish line.

While this style is effective in getting things done and driving for results, it's a style that can hurt team members. Even the most driven employees may become stressed working under this style of leadership in the long run.

This style may still serve you well if for example you're an energetic entrepreneur working with a like-minded team on developing and announcing a new product or service. This is a short term style. A pace-setting leader needs to let the air out of the tires once in a while to avoid causing team burnout.

4. Democratic Style

"What do you think?"

Democratic leaders share information with employees about anything that affects their work responsibilities and also seek employees' opinions before approving a final decision.

There are numerous benefits to this participative leadership style. It can engender trust and promote team spirit and cooperation from employees. It allows for creativity and helps employees grow and develop. A democratic leadership style gets people to do what you want to be done but in a way that they want to do it.

5. Coaching Style

"Consider this"

A leader who coaches views people as a reservoir of talent to be developed. A coach approach seeks to unlock people's potential.

Leaders who use a coaching style open their hearts and doors for people. They believe that everyone has power within themselves. A coaching leader gives people a little direction to help them tap into their ability to achieve all that they're capable of.

6. Affiliative Style

"People come first"

The affiliative leadership approach is one where the leader gets up close and personal with people. A leader practicing this style pays attention to and supports the emotional needs of team members. The leader strives to open up a pipeline that connects him or her to the team.

This style is all about encouraging harmony and forming collaborative relationships with teams. It's particularly useful, for example, in smoothing conflicts among team members or reassuring people during times of stress.

7. Laissez-Faire Style

This leadership styles involves the least amount of oversight. On one end, the autocratic style leader stands as firm as a rock on issues, while the laissez-faire leader lets people swim with the current.

On the surface, a laissez-faire leader may appear to trust people to know what to do, but taken to the extreme, an uninvolved leader may end up appearing aloof. While it's beneficial to give people opportunities to spread their wings, with a total lack of direction, people may unwittingly drift in the wrong direction—away from the critical goals of the organization.

This style can work if you're leading highly skilled, experienced employees who are self-starters and motivated. To be most effective with this style, it is necessary to monitor team performance and provide regular feedback.

Choosing Leadership Styles

Knowing which of the leadership styles works best for you is part of being a good leader. Developing a signature style with the ability to stretch into other styles as the situation warrants may help enhance your leadership effectiveness.

1. Understand the different styles.

Get familiar with the repertoire of leadership styles that can work best for a given situation. What new skills do you need to develop?

2. Know yourself.

Start by raising your awareness of your dominant leadership style. You can do this by asking trusted colleagues to describe the strengths of your leadership style. You can also take a leadership style assessment.

3. Practice makes a leader.

Be genuine with any approach you use. Moving from a dominant leadership style to a different one may be challenging at first. Practice the new behaviors until they become natural. In other words, don't use a different leadership style as a "point-and-click" approach. People can smell a fake leadership style a mile away—authenticity rules.

4. Develop your leadership agility.

Traditional leadership styles are still relevant in today's workplace, but they may need to be combined with new approaches in line with how leadership is defined for the 21st century.

Today's business environments are fraught with challenges due to the changing demographics and the employee expectations of a diverse workforce. This may call for a new breed of leader who is an amalgam of most of the leadership styles discussed here.

"An agile leadership style may be the ultimate leadership style required for leading today's talent"

Learning Outcomes

• Identify leadership styles

We’ve already talked about how personality traits, behaviors and situations (and response to those situations) affect leadership. But what about style? Every leader has their own personal approach. In fact, one might assume that there are as many leadership styles as there are leaders.

Traditional Leadership Styles

Leadership style is a leader’s approach to providing direction, implementing plans, and motivating people. In 1939, psychologist Kurt Lewin and a team of researchers determined that there were three basic leadership styles: Authoritarian (Autocratic), Participative (Democratic) and Delegative (Laissez-Faire). They put these three leadership styles into action with a group of school children charged with the completion of a craft project to determine responses to the leadership styles.

Authoritarian (Autocratic) Leadership

Researchers found there was less creativity under an authoritarian leadership style, but the children were still productive.

While authoritarian leadership sounds stifling, it has its place: it’s best applied to situations where there is little time for group decision making, or when the leader has expertise that the rest of the group does not. When authoritarian leadership strays into areas where it’s not needed, it can create dysfunctional environments where followers are the “good guys” and domineering leaders the “bad guys.”

Participative (Democratic) Leadership

Group members feel engaged in the decision making process when they have a participative leader. Those leaders practicing the participative leadership style offer guidance to the group, as for their input in decision making but retain final say. Participative leaders make their group feel like they’re part of a team, which creates commitment within the group.

Lewin’s researchers found that the participative style of leadership yielded the most desirable results with the school children and their craft project. They weren’t quite as productive as the children in the authoritarian group, but their work was a higher quality.

There are drawbacks to the participative style. If roles within the group are unclear, participative leadership can lead to communication failures. If the group is not skilled in the area in which they’re making decisions, poor decisions could be the result.

Delegative (Laissez-Faire) Leadership

Leaders practicing the delegative leadership style are very hands-off. They offer little or no guidance to their group and leave decision making up to the group. A delegative leader will provide the necessary tools and resources to complete a project and will take responsibility for the group’s decisions and actions, but power is basically handed over to the group.

Lewin and his team found that the group of children trying to complete the craft project under the delegative leader were the least productive. They also made more demands of their leader, were unable to work independently and showed little cooperation.

The delegative style is particularly appropriate for a group of highly skilled workers, and creative teams often value this kind of freedom. On the other hand, this style does not work well for a group that lacks the needed skills, motivation or adherence to deadlines, and that can lead to poor performance.

As you might have guessed, further research has yielded more leadership styles than the original three that Lewin and his team identified in 1939. Still, Lewin’s studies were influential in establishing a starting point for this kind of research. Let’s take a look at some additional leadership styles proposed by researchers since Lewin developed his original framework.

Transactional Leadership

Transactional leadership is a set of activities that involve an exchange between followers and leader and deal with daily tasks (Bass, 1990). Transactional leadership deals with those day-to-day tasks that get the job done. The majority of models we talked about in the last section—Fiedler’s Contingency Theory, Path-Goal among them—are based on the concept of this exchange between leaders and followers. The leader provides followers with direction, resources and rewards in exchange for productivity and task accomplishment.

Charismatic Leadership

• High degree of confidence and lack of internal conflict
• High energy and enthusiasm
• Good communication skills
• Good image and role model

The relationship between charismatic leader and followers is an emotional one (this can sometimes go awry—just think about the relationship between the leaders and followers in a cult). In order for a charismatic leader to be effective, the situation has to be right. There are four situations required for a charismatic leader to have success:

• Organization is in a time of crisis or stress.
• Organization is in need of change.
• There is opportunity for the organization to have new goals or direction.
• Availability of dramatic symbols (like the CEO taking a pay cut or donating his salary to charity)

Culturally speaking, those cultures with a tradition of prophetic salvation (e.g., Christianity, Islam) are more welcoming of the charismatic leader, while cultures without prophetic tradition are less likely to embrace them.

In spite of a limited amount of scientific study where charismatic leaders are concerned, researchers agree there are applications and lessons to be learned out of this type of leadership. Leaders should have belief in their own actions. They should seek to develop bonds with their followers. And they must be able to communicate their messages clearly.

Transformational Leadership

Transformational leadership takes a chapter out of the book of charismatic leadership. (Bass, 1990) Followers admire and are inspired to act. But the transformational leadership concept takes that one step further and expects intellectual stimulation from a leader, as well as individual consideration, in which a leader singles out followers and provides them with additional motivation.

Transformational leaders motivate and teach with a shared vision of the future. They communicate well. They inspire their group because they expect the best from everyone and hold themselves accountable as well. Transformational leaders usually exhibit the following traits:

• Integrity
• Self-awareness
• Authenticity
• Empathy

Measuring a leader’s ability to inspire and enable is a challenge, so researchers rely on anecdotes to supply data. This makes scientific study difficult. And even though this theory emphasize leadership behavior, it’s difficult to determine how a leader can learn to be charismatic and transformational.

Servant Leadership

If you’ve read up on the Southwest Airlines organization, then you already understand the concept of servant leadership – they profess to practice it daily. A “servant leader” is someone, regardless of their level on the corporate hierarchy, who leads by meeting the needs of the team. (Greenleaf, 1970)

Values are important in the world of servant leadership, and those that lead within this network do so with generosity of spirit. Servant leaders can achieve power because of their ideals and ethics.

There are many more leadership styles out there to be studied. Daniel Goleman, et. al., has written extensively about the concept of emotional intelligence in business, and he and his team review six emotional leadership styles in their book Primal Leadership. Flamholtz and Randle proposed a leadership style matrix in 2007 which measures the quality of people on a team versus the quality of the task to determine which leadership style is most appropriate.

By understanding various frameworks of leadership and how they work, those who are stepping up to lead can develop their own approaches to leadership and be more effective.

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