There are a number of different leadership style frameworks that can be used to categorise different types of leaders. One of the most well-known was developed by psychologist, Kurt Lewin (Lewin’s Leadership Styles). He suggested that there were three major styles of leadership:
Figure 1. Lewin’s Leaderships Styles
Autocratic leaders make decisions based on their own judgement, without any input from their team members. This style is useful when quick decision making is required or when a mutual agreement from all team members seems unlikely. However, this could make team members feel their contribution within the team is unimportant, as their opinions and ideas are not being considered. This could lead to feeling demoralised and demotivated within the workplace and result in increased levels of job dissatisfaction, absenteeism and staff turnover.
Democratic leaders will make final decisions but will always include team members in the decision-making process. They will encourage their team to share ideas and will emphasise the importance of their team being involved within projects. Team members feel more included and valued with democratic leadership, it therefore increases job satisfaction and higher productivity. Although this leadership style is highly effective, this is not necessarily the best style to adopt when quick decision making is required.
Laissez-faire is French for “let do” implying in this sense, let people do as they choose. Laissez-faire leaders take a relaxed approach to guiding their team, allowing their team members to carry out work without direction and even set their own deadlines for projects. They won’t usually get involved unless the team require support with resources or request advice. This level of autonomy for team members can lead to high level of job satisfaction. However, by not having deadlines set by their team leader they may not manage their time as efficiently. They also wouldn’t necessarily delegate tasks based on their individual knowledge and skills, they could also lack self-motivation and require direction to work through tasks. It is therefore highly likely that this form of leadership would result in decreased levels of productivity.
Combining the positive aspects of autocratic, democratic and laissez-faire, leadership could be argued to result in the perfect leader. Quick decision making (autocratic) combined with encouraging ideas and decisions from team members (democratic) and providing them with a degree of autonomy over the task or project (laissez-faire) is likely to result in the highest levels of job satisfaction, motivation, productivity and workplace commitment.