STYLES OF LEADERSHIP

Styles of Leadership



Styles of Leadership

Leadership

The term leadership, by its very nature, is laden with meaning often derived from the interpreter's varied life history. For some, this represents an internalized identity, shared processes, or civic engagement grounded in experiences as social activists, with developmental mentors, or from positive group experiences. For others, the term may elicit a more negative interpretation associated with abuses of power, positionality, or an impersonal focus on end goals. These interpretations are often the effect of sociohistorical marginalization or negative encounters with those that inappropriately wielded influence. Both ends of this interpretive spectrum can also be found in the body of literature representing leadership theory. Contemporary theory, however, has attempted to reframe the term with a greater focus on moral discourse and social purpose, shifting away from previous theory that favored management, production, and authority.

Styles of Leadership

Transforming Leadership

Burns's work broadened the view of leadership as something beyond the behaviors of a positional leader to include processes among those engaged in accomplishing shared purposes. He also advocated a values-based approach to leadership. Beyond transactions that always occur between leaders and members of organizations, he advised leaders to develop their followers to be leaders themselves. Burns's comfort with advancing values reframed leadership for many scholars as inherently acknowledging the authentic internal character of people engaging in trusting and honorable relationships toward positive, moral outcomes (e.g., liberty and justice). Burns's complex work uses presidents and other positional leaders as examples, which paradoxically can be confusing to readers in relation to his message that everyone is to be brought into the leadership process and be thought of as leaders themselves.

Building on Burns's notions of transforming and transactional leadership processes, Bernard Bass and colleagues (Bass, 1985; Bass and Riggio, 2006) framed their research to explore what Bass termed transformational leadership, initially rejecting the ethical and moral component of Burns's model. The inclusion of charisma as a transformational leader trait in Bass's and Bruce Avolio's work (1994) paralleled a resurgence in the concept of charismatic leadership by other scholars, though this was not intended by Burns. Bass and colleagues were seeking to identify the dynamic between the leader and individual followers that elevated followers to be leaders themselves, and initially charisma seemed to describe that dynamic. Avolio and his colleagues subsequently went on to further explore this dynamic and the moral character of leadership and identified authentic leadership as its underlying foundational structure.

 

Servant Leadership

Generated concurrently with Burns's work in the 1970s, AT&T executive Robert Greenleaf published a series of papers viewing the positional leader as the servant of ideas and the servant of enabling others in the organization to achieve desired outcomes. Compiled into a book by the late 1970s and challenging common notions of power wielding and authority in positional roles, Greenleaf (1977) sought to empower positional leaders to realize their greater impact through engaging and supporting others. His work widely engaged shifts in corporate settings toward more networked, team-oriented environments and was an affirmation to many ...