Leadership theory

Tannenbaum & Schmidt’s Leadership Continuum

One criticism of early work on leadership styles is that they looked at styles too much in black and white terms. The autocratic and democratic styles or task-oriented and relationship-oriented styles which they described are extremes, whereas in practice the behaviour of many, perhaps most, leaders in business will be somewhere between the two. Contingency theorists Tannenbaum and Schmidt suggested the idea that leadership behaviour varies along a continuum and that as one moves away from the autocratic extreme the amount of subordinate participation and involvement in decision taking increases. They also suggested that the kind of leadership represented by the democratic extreme of the continuum will be rarely encountered in formal organisations.

Four main leadership styles can be located at points along such a continuum:

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