What Is Your Leadership Style?
Four behaviours, ranked by how well each one actually works
Leadership is one of the few areas of this kind where the evidence is genuinely strong, because organisations have been measuring outcomes for decades. The model here separates four things a person in charge can do: inspire, reward, correct, or stay out of the way. They are not four equally valid preferences - the research has a clear ranking, and one of the four is reliably worse than doing nothing on purpose.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer about how you actually behave when you are responsible for other people's work. If you have never managed anyone, answer about group projects, volunteering or family.
What it measures
Four leadership behaviours. Transformational leadership raises people's sense of purpose and develops them individually. Contingent reward makes expectations and consequences clear. Management by exception watches for mistakes and steps in when they appear. Laissez-faire is the absence of leadership - being nominally in charge and not actually leading. Most people use all four to some degree.
Based on: Full range leadership model: transformational, transactional and laissez-faire (Bass & Avolio)
Possible results
Transformational
Raising the purpose and developing the person.
Contingent reward
Clear expectations, clear consequences, kept promises.
Management by exception
Watching for what goes wrong and stepping in.
Laissez-faire
Being in charge without leading. A warning light, not a style.
Common questions
I have never managed anyone. Is this useful?
Yes, in two ways. These behaviours appear in any situation where someone is responsible for a shared outcome - a group project, a committee, a household. And knowing the pattern is at least as useful from below as from above: it gives you language for what your own manager is doing, which makes a difficult one easier to work with and an absent one easier to name.
Is transformational leadership always better?
No, and the meta-analysis itself says so. Contingent reward beat transformational leadership on several individual outcomes, and the gap between them is smaller than the popular version of this research suggests. If you are choosing where to put effort and you are not naturally inspiring, being clear and keeping your word gets you most of the way there - and unlike charisma, it can be learned in a week.
My laissez-faire score is high and I do not think I am a bad manager.
The two are not in conflict. A high score here is usually a symptom rather than a character judgement, and the most common cause is having more responsibility than time, which produces exactly this pattern: the urgent gets answered and the important gets postponed. It is also worth separating it from delegation, which is the opposite thing - delegation is deciding who owns something and saying so. Laissez-faire is nobody knowing.
Sources
- Judge, T. A., & Piccolo, R. F. (2004). Transformational and transactional leadership: A meta-analytic test of their relative validity. Journal of Applied Psychology.
- Bass, B. M., & Avolio, B. J. (2004). Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire: Manual and sampler set (3rd ed.). Mind Garden.
- Lowe, K. B., Kroeck, K. G., & Sivasubramaniam, N. (1996). Effectiveness correlates of transformational and transactional leadership: A meta-analytic review of the MLQ literature. The Leadership Quarterly.
An honest note Two things to hold in mind. First, this measures how you see yourself leading, and leadership is the domain where self-ratings and subordinate ratings agree least - the people who report to you are a far better source on this than you are, and asking them is the single most useful thing you can do with a result like this. Second, the transformational model has been criticised within the field for mixing behaviours with their effects: some of its items describe what a leader does and others describe how followers feel about it, which inflates the correlation with outcomes. The overall ranking of the four behaviours is well supported; the precise size of the transformational advantage over plain clarity and fairness is less so.
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