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.
