Reviewing Leadership Styles: Overlaps and the Need for a New ‘Full‐Range’ Theory

TLDR

Leadership research examines how leaders’ attitudes and behaviors influence outcomes, and since 2000, new styles have been proposed to fill gaps beyond the dominant charismatic/transformational and transactional frameworks. The authors call for a new full‑range leadership model that integrates the unique aspects of emerging styles and their overlap with transformational leadership. They review literature on emerging styles—ideological, pragmatic, authentic, ethical, spiritual, distributed, integrative public, and servant leadership—and analyze how these styles overlap with transformational leadership. The authors contend that an integrated full‑range model is essential for advancing leadership‑style research.

Abstract

A central topic in leadership research concerns the impact of leadership style – the pattern of attitudes that leaders hold and behaviors they exhibit. Since the year 2000, several new leadership styles have been proposed to capture important missing aspects beyond the dominant charismatic/transformational and transactional framework. The authors review the emerging literature on these new styles – ideological leadership, pragmatic leadership, authentic leadership, ethical leadership, spiritual leadership, distributed leadership, and integrative public leadership – as well as the recent work on servant leadership. They also comment on the Ohio State studies on leadership, and then discuss the ways in which these many styles overlap with transformational leadership and each other, and issue a call to leadership researchers to collectively develop a new ‘full‐range’ model of leadership that encompasses and distills what is unique about these various styles. The authors argue that such an integrated full‐range model is necessary for research on leadership style to progress.