Time to Abandon “Leadership Styles”
A 2024 study exploring 12 dominant leadership styles (7 samples, 5 countries, multiple organizations, 4k participants) found out there’s massive redundancy and overlapping across them, and they might very well not exist.
It seems all leadership comes down to general factors with some limited broad variances, plus the specific affective quality of the leader-follower relationship. This last point seems to be much more impactful than any of the variances the “styles” model would predict.
The authors suggest the 12 styles are just not distinct enough to be useful, and the entire concept should be dropped in favor of a simpler, limited number of taxonomic categories, “as most leader behaviours seem to fit nicely under these larger umbrellas (e.g., task, relational)”.
