Types of Leadership & Leadership Traits
The earliest view of this was that leaders are born, not made: the “great man”
approach. All successful leaders, from Julius Caesar to Jack Bauer, were thought to
have certain traits (intelligence, assertiveness, ambition, they are usually dominant
males). One of the earliest writers about what makes a “great man” was the Roman
writer Plutarch [right], whose book Parallel Lives (c. AD 100) sets biographies of
great Romans beside great Greeks for the reader to find comparisons. The “Great
Man” approach suggests great leaders would excel in any field, so a great football
coach could equally well have been a successful general, and vice versa. Early
psychologists focused on the behavioral aspects of leadership. Andrew Halpin
(1966) suggests two aspects of good leadership:
1. Consideration: good leaders foster good relations and treat everyone equally (ie they promote
social cohesion)
2. Initiating structure: good leaders are focused on the task and direct the group to achieve the task
(ie they also promote task cohesion)
Some of the earliest research into leadership styles was by Kurt Lewin et al.
(1939) who studied the adult leaders at boys‟ youth clubs where the 11-yearold boys had arts & crafts tasks like making masks. The boys were placed into
three groups and the groups were matched on the boys‟ IQ and popularity. The
researchers noted the effects of three styles of leadership (Lewin calls them
“climates”) on productivity and aggression:

Autocratic: the authoritarian leader tells the group who is doing what and
how; comments are not invited. This style does not foster good relations and
when the adult was absent the boys tended to slow down or stop. The boys
became either APATHETIC or AGGRESSIVE when things went wrong. However, this group
achieved good results (74% of time spent working) – the autocratic style works best when the team is
working towards a specific goal.
 Democratic: the participative leader encourages individuals in the team to get involved; ideas
are listened to and discussion is encouraged, but the leader still gets the final decision. This
group continued to work well when the adult was absent and cooperated when things went
wrong. However, it was less productive than the autocratic group (50% of time working).
 Laissez-faire: also known as delegative leadership, this is where group members get on with
things in their own way. Leaders may help individuals out with difficulties but offer no
direction or involvement. These groups were the most aggressive when things went wrong, gave
up easily and were the least productive.
Overall, the democratic climate produced the best outcomes: the children worked independently, had
good relationships and morale was high. However, it should be noted that the autocratic climate
produced more finished masks and a minority of children stated that they preferred the autocratic
climate.
Lewin was a very influential social psychologist. He later replicated the same experiment, getting the
leaders to swap their leadership styles. Each leader could, apparently quite easily, adopt different
leadership styles, which shows that leadership style is a different thing from personality.
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Nevertheless, many researchers remained interested in the “Great Man” approach and looked for key
traits that successful leaders have in common. Ralph Stogdill (1948) carried out a META-ANALYSIS
by searching through all the published research into leadership and identifying factors that were studied
by at least three investigators. Stogdill looked at factors like age, height, appearance and intelligence. In
general, Stogdill‟s findings were contradictory: some leaders were young but other studies found them
to be older; tallness is associated with leadership sometimes but Napoleon, Hitler and Ghandi were all
short; leaders tend to be brighter than average but too much intelligence seems to work against effective
leadership. The only consistent finding was that leaders were fluent in their speech, using vivid and
original expressions.
Contingency Theories of Leadership
Many psychologists have criticized taking a dispositional view of leadership, as if leadership was
about some “Great Man” with certain special qualities. Fred Fiedler (1964) argued that leadership was
contingent upon a number of situational factors, so this approach picked up the name “contingency
theory”. Fiedler divided leaders into those who are
1. relationship-motivated (democratic behavior, promotes social cohesion) or
2. task-motivated (autocratic behavior, promotes task cohesion)
When Fielder compared this with different sorts of tasks he found that simple/well-learned or
difficult/unfamiliar tasks required a task-orientated leader, but moderately challenging tasks benefit
from having a relationship-motivated leader. In other words, there is no one type of “perfect” leadership
style; it is all contingent on the situation and leadership behavior that works in one situation won‟t
necessarily work in another. True leaders are flexible: they have a range of strategies at their disposal
and can switch quickly between them based on who they‟re dealing with and what the challenge is.
This mixture of situational and dispositional thinking is an INTERACTIONIST approach. An
advantage of an interactionist approach to leadership is that it stops being a fixed quality that someone
either has or lacks and it becomes a set of skills that can be taught. Nevertheless, Fiedler‟s research was
done in an office environment and isn‟t sport-specific.
Packianathan Chelladurai (left) worked with
Albert Carron (right, 1978) to develop a sportspecific contingency theory of leadership, based on
Fiedler‟s model. This is called the multidimensional
model of leadership (MML). The MML identifies 5
key dimensions of leadership behaviour:
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Training & instruction: how the coach improves players‟ performances
Democratic behavior: how the coach encourages collective decision-making
Autocratic behavior: how the coach asserts his own authority
Social support: the concern the coach shows for others‟ wellbeing
Feedback: the positive reinforcement the coach provides
This model emphasizes the need for flexibility; coaches need to employ a range of teaching styles:
encouraging inexperienced players, being more demanding with more mature players, etc. Chelladurai
links this model back to Lewin’s research into leadership climate, but shows in more detail how a
climate is created. He points out the three possible leader behaviors:
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Prescribed behavior is how the organization demands that a leader behaves – following the
rules, discipline system and traditions
Preferred behavior is how the team members would like their leader to behave
Actual behavior is what the leader really does
Chelladurai argues that a LAISSEZ-FAIRE climate is created when prescribed, preferred and actual
behavior is all incongruent – they don‟t match up. For example, the leader isn‟t following the rules or
meeting the group‟s expectations. If all three are congruent then the group will perform at its best and
everyone will be satisfied. Other combinations produce less satisfactory results: if prescribed and actual
leadership behavior is congruent (the leader is following the rules) but preferred behavior is different,
the group will be unhappy. If prescribed and preferred are congruent (the group want the rules to be
followed) but actual behavior is different then some sort of rebellion is on the cards! If preferred
leadership is congruent with actual leadership (the group get the leader they want) but incongruent with
prescribed leadership, everybody will be happy but performance may suffer.
Chelladurai has created a sport-specific model of leadership that takes into account all the different
things a team captain or coach might find themselves doing. For example, sport leaders have to follow
the rules of the game (prescribed and actual behavior are congruent) but sometimes they might want to
break the rules in order to make a point; quite often the players want to break the rules (prescribed
behavior and preferred behavior are incongruent) and the leader has to persuade them not to.
Based on the MML, Packianathan Chelladurai created the Leadership Scale for Sports (LSS) to
measure how effective a coach is. The questionnaire has 40 items, each preceded by “The coach
should…” followed by 5 options (always, often, occasionally, seldom, never). The scale helps coaches
identify which of the 5 areas of the MML they need to develop.
Coaching
Coaches can give guidance to players in three ways:
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Verbal guidance involves the coach speaking to the players, either giving instructions or
feedback. It must be clear, concise and relevant.
Visual guidance links in very closely with Self-Efficacy, since the coach provides a
demonstration for the player to copy.
Manual guidance involves providing physical assistance. This gives the athlete extra
confidence while they become familiar with the new skill. For example, a coach teaching a
young rugby player how to hold a ball before a kick might put his hands over the player‟s to
help the player get a „feel‟ for how it should be done.
Nevertheless, a lot of traditional coaching involved a “winning is
everything” mentality that involved giving lots of time and attention to
elite players, leaving others in the group feeling demotivated and
alienated. Coaches were notorious for having favorites, bullying less
athletic players and having a “do as-I-say, not as-I-do” philosophy.
Ronald Smith & Frank Smoll (1979) made a study of coaches‟ behavior
and the effect it had on players. They devised the Coaching Behaviour
Assessment System (CBAS), an observational scale that identifies 12 types of coaching, such as
technical instruction, reinforcement, punishment and encouragement. The CBAS has shown that
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players are often a better judge of the coach‟s behaviour than the coach is, and that the coach‟s
behaviour affects the players‟ attitudes to the sport and to each other.
In 1979 Smith & Smoll designed the Coach Effectiveness Training program (CET) to teach youth
coaches about team-building, esteem-nurturing and example-setting. Based on cognitive-behavioral
therapy techniques, CET teaches coaches to be aware of their own behavior and understand how their
behavior affects young athletes. CET also encourages coaches to improve children's skills and reward
their efforts, rather than the "winning is everything" philosophy common in sports (i.e., goalorientation rather than win-orientation). Smith & Smoll produced guidelines for coaching and
recommended extrinsic rewards, which should be:
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a result of a particular behavior rather than a generalized “well done”, e.g., feedback about
techniques
given immediately, to strengthen the association between the behavior and its reinforcement
applied intermittently, so behavior continues even without reinforcement
Smith & Smoll took 34 Seattle-based Little League Baseball coaches and trained 18 in CET. The
training session lasted about 2 hours. The coaches were observed
for 2 weeks and the children were given self-esteem
questionnaires. Children with CET-trained coaches reported
greater enjoyment and enthusiasm for the coming season than
those in the control group. Their confidence was higher, their
anxiety was lower and there was less aggression. The children
who started with the lowest self-esteem reported the most dramatic
improvement. Teams with CET-trained coaches also won more
often (55% compared with 45%).
With childhood obesity on the rise and childhood participation in sports dropping off, getting and
keeping kids involved in sports is becoming ever more important. Smith & Smoll's CET program helps
coaches make sports personally fulfilling for young athletes. The athletes of CET-trained coaches also
keep up their sports habits longer than do athletes of non-trained coaches. More than 18,000 coaches in
the US, Canada, and Israel have been trained in CET, and an estimated 1.5 million children have
benefited from the healthy psychological environment that trained coaches create. These coaches and
athletes hail from a variety of organizations, including Little League Baseball, the U.S. Soccer
Federation, Boys' and Girls' Clubs, Catholic Youth Organizations, YMCA, and public school districts.
Recently, adults on teams, in boardrooms, and even in two major league baseball organizations have
started using CET-trained coaches, instructors and managers.
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