Leadership Styles

Journal o] Applied Psychology 1976, Vol. 61, No. 2, 136-139

A Facet Analysis of Leadership Styles
Zur Shapira Graduate School of Management, University of Rochester
Leadership styles were defined as a function of three facets: the leader 's behavior, the locus of power, and the locus of information within a managementsubordinate system. Five leadership styles were defined by these facets: direction, negotiation, consultation, participation, and delegation. The common order that exists within each facet determined a partially ordered set of leader styles. The intercorrelation matrix of loader styles, based on survey data, was subjected to the Guttman-Lingoes smallest space analysis, which transforms correlation coefficients to distances in an Euclidean space. The hypothesized partial order relations among the different leader styles were accurately reflected in the analysis. This lends support to the potential of facet analysis in studying leadership styles.

This paper examines facet analysis (cf. Guttman, 1959, 1966) as a method for developing and testing hypotheses about structural relations of leadership styles. Heller (1971) suggested that leaders ' decision styles can be described along an influence-power continuum. Bass and Valenzi (1974) followed this approach and defined five leadership styles: direction, negotiation, consultation, participation, and delegation. These styles can be characterized according to the relative degree of authoritativeness that is inherent in the specific leader style. Bass and Valenzi (1974) postulated that leadership style is a part of a broader management-subordinate system, and that two major variables in this system are the power and the information distribution between the leader and his subordinates. Hence, the probability that a certain leader style will occur partly depends on the power and information differences between the leader and his subordinates. To test the Bass and Valenzi (1974) postulates on leader

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