Leadership styles by Daniel Goleman
Adapted from lecture materials by David Root [1].
Leadership style is the habitual way a leader makes decisions, motivates people, manages change and handles crises. Daniel Goleman describes six, each built on different emotional-intelligence competencies and each moving team climate in a different direction [2]. The best leaders are flexible: they know several and switch to the one the situation asks for. Applying them is the companion page, Leading in Practice.
The six styles
Each row gives the style’s characteristic sentence, the situation it fits, what it costs when overused, and its measured effect on climate.
| Style | When it fits | What it costs | Climate | In a software team |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Coercive — “Do what I tell you” | Real crisis, turnaround, a problem employee | Kills creativity and initiative once it outlasts the crisis | −.26 | Incident commander driving a rollback during an outage |
| Authoritative (visionary) — “Come with me” | A new direction or strategic pivot | Falls flat if the leader lacks credibility with experts | .54 | CTO sets the mission and OKRs; squads choose the implementation |
| Affiliative — “People come first” | Repairing trust; high stress; after layoffs | Hard feedback goes unsaid, mediocrity is tolerated | .46 | Team lead protecting wellbeing after a punishing release |
| Democratic — “What do you think?” | Buy-in is needed, or the ideas are not yet in the room | Slow decisions, sometimes none | .43 | Architecture settled in cross-functional design reviews |
| Pacesetting — “Do as I do, now” | A short, defined push with proven self-starters | Burnout; teamwork and learning erode | −.25 | Founder demanding rapid MVPs in one sprint |
| Coaching — “Try this” | Growing people toward the next level | Slow; needs leader skill and a willing person | .42 | One-on-one mentoring, pairing, development plans |
The climate column is not an adjective chosen here: it is the correlation reported in the “Getting Molecular” exhibit. Each style was scored against six drivers of organizational climate — flexibility, responsibility, standards, rewards, clarity, commitment — and climate is reported to account for “nearly a third” of financial results [2].
The result the researchers did not expect
Pacesetting, at −.25, is essentially as damaging as coercive at −.26, and it is negative on five of the six climate drivers. The authors say so themselves: “That’s not what we expected to find. After all, the hallmarks of the pacesetting style sound admirable” [2]. The style that reads best on paper measured second-worst in the data.
That is why the numbers are worth teaching rather than the six labels, and it matters most for readers arriving from a technical role, where the instinct is exactly “set a high standard and show them how.” Two smaller inversions vanish when the ratings become adjectives: democratic (.43) ranks below affiliative (.46) — the article notes its impact “is not as high as you might imagine” — and coaching (.42) is the style used least often.
What the software-specific evidence adds
The six styles come from a general executive population. A leadership study collected from technical staff finds a factor that is not among them. Thite surveyed Australian IS/IT project managers, their subordinates and senior IT managers with an extended Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire [3]; principal-components analysis produced five scales, one new and domain-derived: the “organisational catalyst” — shield the team from organizational bureaucracy, satisfy the desire for autonomy, align individual goals with organizational ones, implement upper management’s decisions dispassionately. Subordinates on the more successful projects rated their managers highest on that scale, ahead of the transformational one. For example, “prevent organizational bureaucracy from interfering with the work of your subordinates” is a better opening line for a software manager than any of the six styles.
How solid is this?
A serious number attached to a study nobody can inspect. The research behind the six styles is proprietary Hay/McBer work that was never published, so nothing here can be replicated — and every figure in the table is a correlation, not a causal effect.
- Where it comes from. “Leadership That Gets Results”, Harvard Business Review, March–April 2000, reprint R00204 [2]; the 2006 and 2017 dates attached to it elsewhere are Routledge anthology reprints, not later research. Hay/McBer — colleagues of David McClelland, the work headed by Mary Fontaine and Ruth Jacobs — sampled 3,871 executives at random from a database of more than 20,000 worldwide. No method, instrument, confidence intervals or industry breakdown are given; endnote 1 discloses that “Daniel Goleman consults with Hay/McBer on leadership development”; and the article hedges that “economic conditions and competitive dynamics matter enormously.” Same shape as the Standish CHAOS numbers in Why Projects Fail [4], and the same answer: still the best numbers on style and climate, quoted with their provenance attached.
- What does not transfer. The population is executives in large organizations, c. 1999: no software teams, no individual contributors, no distributed work.
- What is contested. McCleskey’s review of the emotional-intelligence debate [5] separates the Mayer–Salovey ability model of EI, the family with the strongest academic standing, from the Boyatzis–Goleman mixed model of workplace competencies that the six styles rest on. The evidence for EI is real but modest — a meta-analysis of 43 studies, n = 5,795 for job performance, showing incremental validity over the Five-Factor Model and IQ — while Antonakis and colleagues conclude that either “EI researchers are using the wrong measures or the wrong methodology, or EI does not matter for leadership”. The styles are usable without the theory of mind beneath them.
- How to read Thite. 111 organisations were invited and 36 took part, each contributing one more- and one less-successful team: 70 project managers, 228 subordinates, 18 senior IT managers. One country, one snapshot, self- and subordinate-report only; success is a senior manager’s judgement, not a measured outcome; one significance test reported; a six-page conference summary whose author says it “indicated the direction for” a validated model rather than delivering one. Its scale runs 5 = low to 1 = high, so lower means are better.
Acknowledgments
This page adapts material from lectures by Eduardo Miranda and David Root [1] on software project management.
References
- D. Root,Managing Software Development. Carnegie Mellon University / Innopolis University lecture series, 2014.
- D. Goleman,“Leadership That Gets Results,” Harvard Business Review, vol. 78, no. 2, pp. 78–90, Mar. 2000.
- M. Thite,“Leadership: a critical success factor in IT project management,” in PICMET ’99: Portland International Conference on Management of Engineering and Technology. Proceedings Vol-1: Book of Summaries (IEEE Cat. No.99CH36310), July 1999, pp. 298–303 vol.2. doi: 10.1109/PICMET.1999.787819.
- The Standish Group International,“CHAOS Report 2015,” The Standish Group International, Inc., 2015.
- J. McCleskey,“Emotional intelligence and leadership: A review of the progress, controversy, and criticism,” International Journal of Organizational Analysis, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 76–93, Jan. 2014, doi: 10.1108/IJOA-03-2012-0568.
Disclaimer: AI is used for text summarization, polishing and explaining. Authors have verified all facts and claims. In case of an error, feel free to file an issue.