Leadership Theories in Administration
Trait, behavioural and situational/contingency approaches to leadership, with their main critiques.
At a glance
Leadership theory moved through three broad phases: trait theories (who leaders are), behavioural theories (what leaders do), and situational/contingency theories (what the context demands).
Trait approach
- Early 20th-century assumption: leaders are born with identifiable traits -- intelligence, self-confidence, determination, integrity, sociability.
- Critique: traits found in one study rarely replicate in another, and the approach ignores the situation entirely -- a trait that helps in one context can hurt in another.
Behavioural approach
- Shifted focus to observable behaviour rather than innate traits, since behaviour can in principle be learned and trained.
- The Ohio State and Michigan studies identified two recurring behaviour clusters: task-oriented (structuring, directing work) and people-oriented (consideration, relationships) -- roughly matching Robert Blake and Jane Mouton's later "Managerial Grid," which plots leaders on both dimensions and treats high-high as ideal.
- Rensis Likert's related work on participative management described a continuum of styles from exploitative-authoritative to participative-group, with the most participative style generally yielding the best long-run results.
Situational and contingency approach
- Argues no single style is universally best -- the right style depends on the follower's maturity, the task, and the organisational context.
- Fiedler's contingency model matches leadership style to how favourable the situation is (leader-member relations, task structure, position power).
- Hersey and Blanchard's situational leadership varies the style (telling, selling, participating, delegating) according to the follower's readiness and competence.
Critique
- None of the three phases fully explains leadership in a rule-bound public bureaucracy, where legal authority and hierarchy already constrain how much "style" can vary.
- Later work (transformational vs transactional leadership) tries to bridge this by distinguishing leaders who merely manage routine exchanges from those who inspire a shared vision -- increasingly cited in public-sector reform discussions.
Answer-writing cue: frame the answer as an evolution -- "from who a leader is, to what a leader does, to what the situation demands" -- and close with one line connecting it to the civil servant's own dilemma: how much discretion a rule-bound hierarchy actually allows a "leadership style" to operate in.
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