Leadership

A recent study suggests that there are leadership styles that are consistent with the abilities, characteristics, and skills that are regarded as contributing to or inhibiting leadership.

The specific findings include 6 clusters. The first 4 contribute to outstanding leadership and the final 2 inhibit leadership.

· Charismatic / Value Based: all cultures recognized this as substantially contributing to leadership. It includes visionary, self sacrifice, integrity, decisiveness and performance oriented.

· Team Oriented: this emerged in second place and emphasizes effective team-building and implementation of a common purpose or goal among team members.

· Participative: this is the degree to which others were involved by the manager in decision making and implementation. It is the opposite of autocratic and non-participative.

· Humane Oriented: it reflects supportive and considerate leadership, but also includes compassion and generosity. It was only moderately associated with contributing to effective leadership.

· Self Protective: this is intriguing as it was newly identified in the study and is linked to being status- and class-conscious, evasive, ritualistic, procedural, normative, secretive, indirect, self-centered, and asocial. Importantly, it is not associated statistically with contributing to outstanding leadership.

· Autonomous: this is also newly identified in this study and is not viewed as contributing to outstanding leadership. It refers to independent and individualistic leadership, what Daniel Goleman in his work on emotional intelligence might call pace-setting leadership.