Leadership, Participatory Democratic

Leadership Categorization

Scholars are following a number of paths for understanding leadership. The evolving stands are not temporally distinct but occur and develop alongside each other, sometimes in concert and sometimes in tension. There are countless ways to categorize these understandings. Some ways to examine leadership have been to categorize it in typologies; to address it within the context of processes; to consider it as a relationship between individuals and between leaders themselves, their tasks, larger structures, and self-concepts; and as a means of meaning making as it is culturally bound, changes, or comes to be intertwined with social identity and societal notions as interpreted in time and space. In doing so, scholars have established a broad field of study, activity, and praxis.

Typologies

Typologies of leadership are numerous and can focus on characteristics of individuals known as leaders. Through these, dissection of the personality of a leader occurs. Often called “great man” or trait theories, these approaches highlight the leader as a distinctly powerful individual, particularly in their personality attributes, such as being charismatic, visionary, passionate, reflective, and self-monitoring. Alternatively, typologies may focus on competencies or behaviors, the ways in which a leader puts into practice traits in order to influence other people. A few examples are motivating, inspiring, collaborating, communicating, and empowering. Still other typologies focus not on the leader, but on the situational variables that influence leader acts and thus present leadership outcomes as contingent in acknowledgment that traits, behaviors, and competencies may not consistently produce results across various circumstances. Rather, issues like the level of structure, crisis, diversity, and variation exemplify just some of the potential influences upon leader tasks. Leadership styles or approaches also can form typologies, as the bringing together of traits and behaviors in situations. Here the lists and literature are abundant, with buzzwords and comparisons of styles expanding at a rapid pace, particularly within the mass marketing of leadership literature, and sometimes with no or only small distinctions being made between concepts. Just a few of these types of leadership styles are (in alphabetical order): adaptive leadership, authoritarian leadership, collaborative leadership, cooperative leadership, directive leadership, distributed leadership, invisible leadership, principle-centered leadership, results-based leadership, servant leadership, shared leadership, socioemotional leadership, spiritual leadership, transactional leadership, and visionary leadership. Typologies, whether of characteristics, competencies and behaviors, situational variables or styles, share the notion that leadership can be dissected, that it is divisible into observable components.

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