Leadership Styles and Theories

Autocratic Leadership: This style is characterised by individual control over all decisions, with little or no input from team members. Autocratic leaders typically make choices based on their own judgement and rarely accept advice from followers.
Democratic Leadership: This style involves leader sharing the decision-making process with the team, thus promoting collaboration, creativity and empowerment. However, the final decision still lies with the leader.
Laissez-faire Leadership: This style involves leaders leaving all decisions up to their team members. It works best when the team is highly skilled and motivated, but can be problematic if team members lack knowledge or direction.
Transformational Leadership: This style encourages, inspires and motivates employees to innovate and create change that helps grow and shape the future success of the company.
Transactional Leadership: This style assumes that team members will only perform adequately if rewards and penalties are in place. Leaders provide clear instructions and monitor their team closely to ensure tasks are done efficiently.

Trait Theory: This theory assumes that individuals are born with inherited traits, and some traits are particularly suited to leadership. Leader can improve their own performance by understanding their personal strengths and weaknesses.
Behavioural Theories: These theories suggest that leaders can be made, rather than born, and successful leadership is resulted from learnable behaviour that anyone can acquire.
Situational Theories: These theories propose that leaders choose the best course of action based on the situational variables and circumstances, such as team member’s skill level, the complexity of the task and the leader’s own competence and experience.
Contingency Theories: These theories considers the leader’s style and the situational variables to predict the leader’s effectiveness. There’s no single leadership style deemed optimal for all situations. Leaders must adapt their approach depending on the situation.
Transactional Theory: This theory posits that a leader’s best approach is through reward and punishment. When team members perform well, they will be positively rewarded. If they fail, they may be punished or not rewarded at all.
Transformational Theory: This theory suggests that the most efficient style of leadership is one that inspires and motivates followers to exceed normal expectations. It is about making meaningful changes within the organisation.