Navigating the spectrum of leadership styles

By Gemma Jiang, Jenny Grabmeier and Joan Lurie.

When you are in a leadership role, are you able to shift your leadership style to accommodate the needs of your team and project? When consensus is hard to reach, are you able to step in with a directive approach? Are you able to hold back from being directive when creativity and participation are needed?

A Spectrum of Leadership Styles

Lewin, Lippitt and White in their foundational 1939 study on group dynamics suggested three leadership styles. In the context of cross-disciplinary science, we do not see these as separate styles or the only three styles, but as reference points along a continuum. At one end of their spectrum lies directive leadership, and at the other, delegative leadership, and somewhere in the middle, participative leadership. Effective leadership is seen as applying the spectrum responsively to the emergent needs of the context.

Directive Leadership: When timely decisions are needed to keep a project on track, a directive approach—characterized by clear instructions and close supervision—can prevent bottlenecks and maintain focus.

Delegative Leadership: At the opposite end of the continuum, delegative leadership excels when ideas need the freedom to flow through cycles of divergence and convergence, ultimately leading to innovative breakthroughs. This approach empowers team members to explore and innovate, fostering creativity and encouraging a diversity of perspectives.

Participative Leadership: Between these two poles is participative leadership that strikes a balance by involving team members in the decision-making process while providing guidance and direction. This style is particularly effective during planning and problem-solving, where input from various perspectives can lead to more informed and robust decisions. By encouraging collaboration and shared responsibility, participative leadership enhances team engagement and ensures that decisions are well-rounded and supported by the group, while still maintaining a clear sense of direction and accountability.

The Balancing Act in Team Science Leadership

In academic and collaborative environments, where consensus, inclusivity, and autonomy are often prized, those in a leadership role may be reluctant to be directive. However, they should recognize when it is the responsibility of their role to guide their team decisively to achieve the best outcomes. Two common and significant contexts where a directive leadership approach can be helpful are:

1. Navigating the Groan Zone: The transition between divergent and convergent thinking is often called the “groan zone,” as described by Carrie Kappel in her i2Insights contribution: Collaboration: From groan zone to growth zone. This phase can feel challenging because it is hard to see how the plentiful ideas generated in the divergent phase can converge into a viable path for action. Leaders play a critical role in guiding teams through this uncertainty, steering them away from indecision and toward a viable course of action. To harness the benefits of team diversity, leaders can cultivate a learning culture where team members regularly reflect on their actions and make ongoing adjustments. This adaptive approach helps counterbalance the drawbacks of overly directive leadership styles.
2. Holding the Vision: In collaborative projects, it is easy to dilute goals by trying to accommodate every perspective out of a desire to be inclusive. However, leaders must maintain a strategic vision and ensure that vision remains front of mind for the team, even if it means not everyone will agree. For example, when developing a new research initiative, a leader might need to prioritize certain ideas over others to keep the project aligned with its original intention. Leadership in complex projects requires making tough decisions to ensure the team remains on track.

Without awareness of the spectrum of leadership styles available, leaders may be stuck in one style. Even worse, they may oscillate unpredictably between styles. For example, they may be covertly directive by creating complicated rules and rubrics without clear guidance, shifting to excessively delegative by leaving teams to operate independently, and then becoming overtly directive when results fall short of expectations and stress levels rise.

In the fast-paced world of cross-disciplinary science teams, effective leadership isn’t about adhering to a fixed set of approaches or behaviors, or following a rigid hierarchy, or about majority rule. Instead, effective leadership requires competence in navigating shifts between leadership styles to respond to what’s needed in the circumstances and maximize the desired outcomes.

Is the spectrum of leadership styles useful in the leadership roles you play? Are there occasions when you have leaned too heavily on one leadership style? What helps you recognize which style is most appropriate in a particular context? How might leadership development effort help enhance your ability to navigate the spectrum?

Reference:

Lewin, K., Lippitt, R. and White, R. K. (1939). Patterns of aggressive behavior in experimentally created “social climates”. Journal of Social Psychology, 10: 271–299.

Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) Statement: Generative artificial intelligence was not used in the development of this i2Insights contribution. (For i2Insights policy on generative artificial intelligence please see https://i2insights.org/contributing-to-i2insights/guidelines-for-authors/#artificial-intelligence.)

Biography: Gemma Jiang PhD is senior team scientist at the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (IRISS) of Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado, USA. She applies complexity leadership theory, social network analysis, and a suite of facilitation and coaching methods to enable cross-disciplinary science teams to converge upon solutions for challenges of societal importance.

Biography: Jenny Grabmeier MA is research strategist and facilitator at the Ohio State University (OSU) Translational Data Analytics Institute in Columbus, Ohio, USA. In her role she oversees research awards to catalyze new interdisciplinary, big data-enabled teams and projects; employs a variety of facilitation methods to support team ideation and strategic planning processes; and collaborates with other Ohio State University institutes and entities to advance large-scale interdisciplinary research initiatives.

Biography: Joan Lurie MA is the Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Orgonomics, a business and methodology she created with the purpose of developing leaders and organizations to be fit for and navigate the complex landscape we are in. Joan works as a consultant and coach to enable leaders, teams and organizations to continuously adapt, perform, thrive and grow as collaborative ecosystems and learning networks.

Funding Acknowledgement:

This publication was supported, in part, by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under Grant Number UM1TR004548. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.