Organization 21C: Someday All Organizations Will Lead This Way

A Taxonomy of Leadership Styles

Both normative and descriptive approaches utilize the same taxonomy of leadership styles. The taxonomy has changed over the life of the research program but the current form is shown in Table 5-1. The terms decide (0), consult individually (3), consult group (5), facilitate (7), and delegate (10), refer to leadership styles, and the numbers in parentheses indicate what most people believe to be the relative amounts of participation that they afford. (A mean score of 2–3 is highly autocratic; a mean score of 6–7 is highly participative.) In the normative model, leadership style is the independent variable and the goal is to understand when each style is likely to be most effective. In our descriptive work, leadership ...