LEADERSHIP / 003 [SHOULD A LEADER INSPIRE OR MAKE CLEAR DEALS?]

Question
Which leadership style works best?

Study
Researchers combined 87 studies on the two most studied leadership styles. The studies came from companies, the military and education, not sport, but they form the basis of much research on coaching.

Findings
Inspiring leadership, where a leader shares a vision, gives personal attention and challenges people to think, was strongly linked to satisfaction with the leader, motivation and how effective the leader was seen to be. Making clear deals, like "if you do this, you get that", was almost as effective, and even stronger on some outcomes. Leaders who only stepped in when things had already gone wrong scored negatively, and absent leaders who avoided decisions scored clearly worst. The links with actual team or company performance were smaller than with satisfaction.

What It Means for Athletes
Inspiration and clear agreements are not opposites. Good leaders combine both. The worst leader is not the strict one, but the one who isn't there. These are links from mostly survey studies outside sport, so they don't prove cause and effect.

Try this: coaches and captains, this week give your team one clear "why" behind a goal, and one clear agreement about what happens when the team delivers.

Source
Judge, T. A., & Piccolo, R. F. (2004). Transformational and transactional leadership: A meta-analytic test of their relative validity. Journal of Applied Psychology, 89(5), pp. 755 to 768.

BEHIND THE SCIENCE
Translating sports science into information athletes can actually use.