Are There Really Any Set Leadership Styles?

I was scrolling through LinkedIn looking for some leadership issues, nuances, or inspirations to spark a conversation.  I came across a post that showed a very simplistic chart of nine leadership styles (with real people examples next to each).  The nine styles of leadership listed were:

1. Servant

2. Coaching

3. Democratic

4. Transformation

5. Autocratic

6. Transactional

7. Situational

8. Delegative

9. Visionary

This list got me thinking about all the different styles of leadership I’ve heard over the years.  The fact that there were even more styles of leadership than just these nine made me look for some of the other styles of leadership.  From memory and a bit of searching online here is a list of sixteen additional styles of leadership:

1. Authentic Leadership – emphasizes self-awareness, transparency, values, and consistency between words and actions.

2. Adaptive Leadership – focuses on helping people navigate complex change and uncertainty.

3. Charismatic Leadership – relies heavily on personal influence, inspiration, and emotional connection.

4. Bureaucratic Leadership – emphasizes adherence to rules, procedures, and established systems.

5. Strategic Leadership – focuses on long-term organizational positioning and alignment.

6. Participative Leadership – similar to democratic leadership but often emphasizes ongoing involvement rather than specific decisions.

7. Pacesetting Leadership – sets very high standards and leads primarily through performance expectations.

8. Affiliative Leadership – prioritizes relationships, harmony, and emotional bonds within the team.

9. Distributed Leadership – leadership functions are shared across multiple individuals rather than concentrated in one person.

10. Shared Leadership – team members collectively exercise leadership depending on expertise and circumstances.

11. Ethical Leadership – emphasizes moral decision-making, fairness, and integrity.

12. Spiritual Leadership – focuses on meaning, purpose, values, and calling.

13. Level 5 Leadership – combines personal humility with professional will (from Jim Collins).

14. Systems Leadership – views organizations as interconnected systems and focuses on relationships and feedback loops.

15. Complexity Leadership – designed for dynamic environments where outcomes emerge from interactions rather than command-and-control structures.

16. Quiet Leadership – influences through reflection, questions, and subtle guidance rather than visible authority.

Wouldn’t these also be considered “styles” of leadership?  With just this list of an additional sixteen, we have 25 different “styles” of leadership.  Which got me thinking even more about what it means to have leadership styles in the first place, because leadership is not about a fixed style and there are so many variables to the leadership process that we could probably just do the math and find that there are thousands of combinations that could be made.

Leaders do not simply apply a style to passive followers.

The Mathematics of Possible Leader–Follower–Situation Interaction Patterns:

Explaining why leadership cannot be reduced to only a certain number of leadership styles or behaviors and understanding the vast amount of variables in the leadership process can be done with some simple mathematics.  Since real leadership occurs in a dynamic open system model, where the variables of leader behavior, follower behavior, and situational context continuously interact to create different outcomes, we can apply a simple mathematical method to show this:

Basic Combinatorial Equation

Let:

• L = Number of Leadership Behaviors

• F = Number of Followership Behaviors

• S = Number of Situational Conditions

Then: 

Where P = Total Possible Leader–Follower–Situation Interaction Patterns.

As an example, if we use the 25 leaders and 25 followers and 25 situations for each pair of leader/follower:

P = 25 × 25 × 25 = 15,625 Possible Leader–Follower–Situation Interaction Patterns

But there are many variables. People act within different intensity levels also.  So, lets say the intensity variables might be “low, moderate or high” (This also doesn’t automatically make “high intensity” a good thing), so let's include the possible variables of intensity level.

Including Behavioral Intensity

If each behavior can occur at different intensity levels:

• Iₗ = Leadership intensity levels

• Iᶠ = Followership intensity levels

Example with 25 leadership behaviors, 25 followership behaviors, each with 3 intensity levels (low, moderate, and high), and then 25 situations we would get:

 P = (25×3) x (25×3) x (25) = 140,625 Possible Leader–Follower–Situation Interaction Patterns.

In full transparency, I really don’t like doing math, but it makes understanding the variable nature and the vast possible numbers of variables in the leadership process really stand out. Which is why I am finding it very difficult to think we can actually say there are only nine leadership styles, or 25 leadership styles, or any set number of leadership styles. So how could we consider this differently and not get locked into a "style."

A Different Way To Consider the Behaviors Rather Than "Styles"

One could argue that what we commonly call "leadership styles" are not actually stable styles at all, but rather observable patterns of behavior that emerge from a complex interaction of human factors. Labels such as transformational, transactional, servant, autocratic, democratic, coaching, or visionary leadership imply that leaders consistently operate according to a fixed style. In reality, however, the same leader may display dramatically different behaviors depending on the situation, the people involved, organizational constraints, personal stress levels, bias, beliefs, available resources, cultural expectations, and perceived risks. A military commander may be highly directive during a battle, collaborative during planning, supportive during development of subordinates, and delegative with experienced personnel; all within the same day.

From this perspective, leadership behavior is less like selecting a style from a menu and more like responding to a dynamic set of human (leader-follower) and environmental conditions. Factors such as personality, emotional state, experience, knowledge, values, motives, organizational culture, power relationships, politics, trust levels, follower competence, follower motivation, time pressure, and external threats all influence how a leader behaves at any given moment. What observers later describe as a "leadership style" may simply be a visible recurring pattern produced by these underlying factors rather than a consciously adopted approach.

This argument becomes even stronger when viewed through an open systems lens. Leadership does not occur in isolation; it emerges through continuous interaction of inputs, throughput processes, outputs, and feedback loops.

This happens among leaders, followers, and situational conditions (context). Followers influence leaders just as leaders influence followers. The behaviors of team members, organizational policies, political pressures, budget limitations, customer expectations, and countless other variables shape what leadership looks like in practice. A leader who appears highly participative with one team may appear authoritarian with another because the circumstances surrounding the interaction have changed or are different.

The concept of “leadership styles” is too simplistic, but as humans we always try to find mental shortcuts (heuristics).  Therefore using the term “style” of commonly observed behavioral patterns may continue, but it risks oversimplifying the reality of human behavior and may cause people to act the way they think their “style” should dictate rather than act based on the totality of the factors involved, which is how leadership decisions and actions are really made. Rather than asking, "What leadership style does this person use?" a more accurate question may be, "What human factors and situational conditions are influencing this person's leadership behaviors in these situations?" Under this view, leadership is not a collection of styles but an adaptive behavioral process shaped by biology, psychology, physiology, behavior, relationships, and situational context.

This perspective aligns closely with the idea that leadership and followership are co-created processes. Leaders do not simply apply a style to passive followers. Instead, both parties continuously send signals, interpret cues, and adjust their behaviors in response to one another and to the environment. What emerges is not a fixed leadership style, but a dynamic pattern of human interaction that changes as the conditions change. In this sense, leadership may be better understood as adaptive behavior within a human system than as a set of predefined styles.