Human Challenges : Weblog

Tuesday May 01, 2007

Leadership Styles

Daniel Goleman refined his concept back in 2000 and as a result published the article Leadership that gets results. Together with the consulting firm Hay/McBer and David McClelland, a Harvard University psychologist he first identified different Leadership styles and then evaluated their influences on “climate”.

The six leadership styles refer to the following types: coercive leaders demand immediate compliance, authoritative leaders mobilize people toward a vision, affiliative leaders create emotional bonds and harmony, democratic leaders build consensus through participation, pacesetting leaders expect excellence and self-direction, coaching leaders develop people for the future.

“Climate” had been defined by Litwin/Stringer and refined by McClelland. It refers to six key factors that influence an organization's environment: flexibility, meaning how free employees feel to innovate; sense of responsibility to the organization; level of standards that people set; sense of accuracy about performance feedback and aptness of rewards; clarity people have about mission and values and finally the level of commitment to a common purpose.

Overall coercive and pacesetting have the least positive influence on climate, all other styles have pretty significant positive influence. The art of leading is being able to use all different styles depending on the situation quickly switching from one to another! That is how leaders get the best results!

Those styles can be an element of coaching. The terminology helps to get to a common understanding and wording that facilitates giving feed-back and discussions around the way a leader acts. The styles could also be used to build a self assessment like this one here to get an entry point for coaching a leader (more about application of the leadership styles concept in this later blog).

Another concept of leadership styles is based on Myers Briggs/Jung Typology. Goleman lays out in more detail his leadership styles and background in Primal Leadership (2002). A book that has also been recommended to me in this context is Executive E.Q.