Most of these approaches all sound the same to me. At least in practice, as applied by a busy boss trying to make real day-to-day decisions. Transformational vs. transactional makes sense intuitively as involving different things, but transformational vs. servant vs. ethical leadership, I’d never be able to keep straight. I think good research on leadership would be a lot smaller than what’s been done. Less Grand Theory of Leadership, more individualized testing of specific behaviors. Successful leaders would probably not agree to be subjected to RCTs because you’d risk making their performance worse. But if you could take e.g. leaders who’ve just received a bad performance review, or people with no prior leadership experience, experimenting offers a lot of upside for them. And if you can turn bad or inexperienced leaders into good ones, or at least better than a control group, then you’re really onto something.
Most of these approaches all sound the same to me. At least in practice, as applied by a busy boss trying to make real day-to-day decisions. Transformational vs. transactional makes sense intuitively as involving different things, but transformational vs. servant vs. ethical leadership, I’d never be able to keep straight. I think good research on leadership would be a lot smaller than what’s been done. Less Grand Theory of Leadership, more individualized testing of specific behaviors. Successful leaders would probably not agree to be subjected to RCTs because you’d risk making their performance worse. But if you could take e.g. leaders who’ve just received a bad performance review, or people with no prior leadership experience, experimenting offers a lot of upside for them. And if you can turn bad or inexperienced leaders into good ones, or at least better than a control group, then you’re really onto something.