The Strategic Leadership Style Model

By Stefan Lindstam and Jan Olsson

Current thought and contemporary guidance about leadership are often grounded in short-lived trends and value judgments about what constitutes “good” leadership. Lindstam and Olsson offer an alternative. They show how managers can improve organisational performance by aligning leadership goals with their organisation’s dynamic opportunities and challenges.
Ideal for professionals in leadership development or executive recruitment, as well as managers looking for fresh perspectives, this book aims to build a bridge between business strategy and leadership behavior.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Books on Demand
• Release date: Dec 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9789180972833

Stefan Lindstam

Dr Stefan Lindstam, is the founder and CEO of Psytest AB. He works in the construction of psychological test methods, such as leadership style, personality, and ability tests, and has served as a consultant in management diagnostics for over 20 years.

Book preview

Content

Introduction

Authors

A practical note

Background

The Ohio studies: Consideration and Initiating Structure

Models using the two leadership dimensions

Models using three leadership dimensions

Other concepts behind the Strategic Leadership Style Model

Leadership style defined

Unipolarity vs. bipolarity

The Strategic Leadership Style Model and its application

Situation

Leadership objectives

How to choose the right leadership objectives

Situations demanding ‘innovative change’

Situations demanding ‘continuity and stable operations’

Situations demanding ‘good relationships and group cohesion’

Situations demanding ‘task focus and boundary setting’

Situations demanding ‘coordination and security’

Situations demanding ‘quick adaptability’

Leadership styles with their direct and indirect leadership behaviours

Changing: Examples of direct leadership behaviour

Changing: Examples of indirect leadership behaviour

Preserving: Examples of direct leadership behaviour

Preserving: Examples of indirect leadership behaviour

Relation-oriented: Examples of direct leadership behaviour

Relation-oriented: Examples of indirect leadership behaviour

Independent: Examples of direct leadership behaviour

Independent: Examples of indirect leadership behaviour

Structured: Examples of direct leadership behaviour

Structured: Examples of indirect leadership behaviour

Flexible: Examples of direct leadership behaviour

Flexible: Examples of indirect leadership behaviour

Compatible and incompatible leadership objectives

Business case

Appendix 1

Appendix 2

Appendix 3

References

Introduction

If you want to improve organisational performance by aligning leadership with your business goals, this book is written for you.

The book is a composite of our own experiences in management diagnostics and an empirically based leadership style model, developed in a dissertation at the University of Mannheim, Germany.

Much of the current thought and guidance regarding leadership is, in our opinion, grounded too often in short-lived leadership trends. This book offers an alternative.

We believe that you think more clearly and make better decisions about the type of leadership your organisation needs if you start with a thoughtful picture of what you want managers to achieve via leadership objectives. What we call ‘leadership objectives’ are business goals that are influenced by leadership behaviour.

This book is based on three central ideas:

An empirically based, stable leadership style model can be used as a foundation for strategically sound decisions about organisational leadership.

The situation of the organisation – or the situation of the individual manager if you take an individual perspective – is important in determining what leadership objectives are crucial for your organisation.

Leadership objectives and leadership styles are interconnected. Each leadership style is well-suited to achieve a distinct leadership objective. Therefore, if you know what leadership objective you want to achieve, you will know what leadership style to promote.

The Strategic Leadership Style Model can be used to promote mutual understanding among team members and increase cooperation in management teams. It can also be used to produce requirement profiles for executive recruitment. However, it is primarily a tool for improving organisational performance through goal-directed leadership development. It integrates ideas from related areas such as strategic management and organisational theory. Although integrative and broad in scope, the Strategic Leadership Style Model is about leadership. It does not address management tasks concerning capital raising, market segmentation, or financial reporting and related activities beyond a superficial level.

We will help you to reach a better understanding of the right leadership for your business. We will show what leadership styles and behaviours you need more of and what behaviours you need less of, and we will also make suggestions about organisational structure that can compensate for a lack of certain leadership behaviours.

We would like to thank Fredrik Arp, Tomas Pira, and Victor Olsson for their valuable feedback on the book’s case study. The dissertation in which the leadership style model was first presented was supervised by Prof. Dr. Werner W. Wittmann. We would like to take the opportunity to thank him again.

Authors

Dr Stefan Lindstam is the founder and CEO of Psytest AB. He works in the construction of psychological test methods, such as leadership style, personality, and ability tests, and has served as a consultant in management diagnostics for over 20 years.

Jan Olsson has worked more than 10 years as HR Director at Trelleborg AB. Jan is also the former owner and CEO of the executive search company Lisberg AB and a senior consultant at Psytest AB.

A practical note

If you want to learn about the Strategic Leadership Style Model and its application but are not interested in the theoretical background of the model, you can skip the two first parts of the book called ‘Background’ and ‘Other concepts behind the Strategic Leadership Style Model’ and begin with the chapter ‘The Strategic Leadership Style Model and its application’.

Background

In personality research, a development spanning decades has led to the well-known Big Five Model of personality. The Big Five Model is widely used, and most modern personality tests rely on this model. What is less known is that there has been a similar development in leadership research.

When you want to study and talk about leadership, the first thing to decide is how to describe leadership. That means finding the most appropriate dimensions to describe leadership behaviour. If the goal is to find such basic dimensions that are stable over time and not simply ‘fashionable leadership’, the best approach is to look at what the large-scale empirical research suggests. We will start by discussing this development in the field of leadership, beginning in the 1950s.

The Ohio studies: Consideration and Initiating Structure

In the 1950s, comprehensive studies were conducted at the Ohio State University (Fleishman, 1953, Stodgill & Coons, 1957, Halpin & Winer, 1957). The studies were empirical investigations of which dimensions are best suited to describe leadership behaviour. Some 1,800 specific examples of leadership behaviour were analysed and reduced to 150 questions in a questionnaire. This questionnaire was distributed to employees who rated the behaviour of their direct supervisor. Various Ohio studies identified two broad leadership dimensions, which accounted for about 85% of the total variation in the answers. They were named ‘consideration’ and ‘initiating structure’.

The dimension consideration (also referred to as ‘employee orientation’) is the degree to which the manager creates an environment of support, warmth, friendliness, and trust. The initiating structure, often referred to as ‘task orientation’, is the degree to which the manager leads by delegating specific tasks, specifying work methods, planning carefully,