Suggested leadership theories for application in the OR
| Theory (key source) | Definition | Foci | Functions |
| Task/team (Fleishman, 195362; Fleishman et al 199163) | The leader should focus on (a) the facilitation of group social interaction and (b) objective task accomplishment. | Task-Social | Plan-Organise, Monitor-act |
| Functional (Hackman and Walton, 198664; McGrath, 196265) | Leader must do, or get done whatever is not being adequately handled for group needs, without specifying how a leader should do it. | Internal-External, Task-Social | Assess, Monitor, Act |
| Contingency (Hersey and Blanchard, 1977)66 | The effectiveness of the leader depends on matching style to team needs. | Internal-External, Situation, Social | Directive, persuasive, delegative |
| Transformational/Transactional (Bass, 1985)67 | Transactional leaders achieve expected performance through exchange of reward for agreed effort. Transformational leaders motivate followers to transcend self-interests in favour of group goals through applied charisma. | Internal-External, Social, transactional-task | Transactional-act if required Transformational-Inspire, set goals. |
| Flexible (Zaccaro et al, 1991)68 | Leaders balance competing demands and tradeoffs among different performance determinants, that is demonstrating ability to recognise what team members need, and respond appropriately to teams' changing task conditions | Internal-External, Task-Social | React according to the situation, balance demands |
| Shared/Distributed (Pearce and Conger, 2003)69 | Multiple members of the team may enact leadership informally, even if a formal leader is present. Leadership is an output of team process as well as an input. | Internal-external, Task-Social | Shared |
| Dynamic/Adaptive (Kozlowski et al, 2009)70 | Ability of the team leader builds and leverages capabilities of team members to adapt to organizational changes, grounded in the team context. | Internal, task-social | Plan, Act, Reflect |
| Complexity (Uhl-Bein and Marion, 2007)71 | Leadership is an interactive system of dynamic, unpredictable agents that interact in complex feedback networks, and can produce adaptive outcomes that is knowledge dissemination, learning, innovation, and further adaptation to change | Interactive, emergent | N/A: Produced by the system, unpredictable |