2023.11.20

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A primer on leadership archetypes, an emerging construct, for executive coaches, organizational development professionals, and HR leaders.

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Leadership Styles from a Research Lens

Transformational, participative, servant, laissez-faire – no doubt you’ve heard of a wide variety of leadership styles. And new ones are popping up all the time – sometimes from scholarly research and sometimes from proprietary models sold by training and development consultants.

Basically, anyone can “identify” a new one and popularize it.

And while there is some great research out there about specific leadership styles and their effectiveness (and other outcomes), there’s been a long-standing critique of the concept as well.

From a scholarly perspective, there is a substantial overlap between styles instead of them being distinct constructs. Additionally, when describing a leadership style, the definition often mixes together the observable behaviors, the evaluation of their underlying intentions, the quality of their execution, and the ultimate impacts.

In other words, things are muddy when it comes to both the underlying theory and the empirical analysis of leadership styles.

For a quick, high-level rundown of prominent leadership theories spanning back to the OG “Great Man” and up to the present, check out Evolution of Leadership Theory (Benmira and Agboola, 2021). It’s a quick read with a nice table for reference.

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Leadership Architypes: An Emerging Alternative

In research, sometimes you come up with a theory first and then you design studies to test it empirically. Other times you collect data and then see what it reveals to you, without imposing a theory on it as a starting point. Both are valid approaches with their own pros and cons. In fact, it can be advantageous to have different researchers using different approaches to study the same thing.

Recent research by Stoker et. al (2023)¹ uses a data-driven approach to see if a variety of distinct leadership behaviors can be grouped into meaningful clusters called “configurations of leadership behaviors” or “leadership archetypes”.

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About the Study

As a baseline, six well-researched leadership styles were selected: authoritative, affiliative, coaching, participative, directive, and pacesetting. Each of those styles can be measured using a research-validated assessment instrument.

Leaders from 38 countries and across 23 industries were rated by their subordinates on the 46 managerial behaviors that comprised the six styles. Each leader was rated by around 5 direct reports.

The overall dataset of responses is large (n=150,000) and the United States is decently represented (n=19,826).

The researchers used empirical techniques to analyze the data and to let it reveal the clusters instead of imposing any theory on it in advance.

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Results

Three leadership architypes were revealed from this data set, and a different number of behaviors comprise each. A behavior can be in more than one archetype.

Each archetype is a combination of the behaviors making up a style and not a perfect match for any style. View a table.

• Archetype 1 scores high on the behaviors related to pacesetting leadership and on one behavior of participative leadership.
• Archetype 2 scores high on behaviors related to directive leadership, and on two behaviors of pacesetting leadership.
• Archetype 3 scores high and exclusively on behaviors in affiliative, authoritative and coaching leadership. Moreover, it also scores high on behaviors belonging to directive and to participative leadership.

The researchers note the archetypes differ primarily along two dimensions: the amount of time that leaders spend with their employees, and how leaders communicate with subordinates.

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Takeaways for Coaches, Org Dev, and HR

Leadership archetypes are an emerging alternative to leadership styles. Stay tuned for more developments as additional studies are performed.

Leadership styles are often an accessible way to think about how leaders behave but in the real world there is overlap between styles and things are messier. Be careful about telling leaders they are just one specific style.

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¹Research Citation: Stoker JI, Garretsen H, Soudis D and Vriend T (2023). A configurational approach to leadership behavior through archetypal analysis. Frontiers of Psychology 13:1022299. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1022299

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