For all the effort over decades to construct a unified theory of leadership, there has been little success. However, there appears to be an interesting trend in the development of theories over this period. The figure below is proposed as an initial integrative model showing the trend in theories.

From the Great Person Theory in which many clusters of traits were proposed as predictors of leadership, a bipolar dimension emerged as having greater utility. The bipolar models (Theory task-Social, X-Y, Autocratic-Democratic, etc.), however, only provided a single continuum for describing leadership in many different situations.

By "bending the single continuum into a tabular format of two independent functions (e.g., task-social) an entire plane could be used with greater richness of description. Greater organization still was achieved by subdividing the plane into a 2x2 table (Hersey & Blanchard's model) or 9x9 (Blake & Mouton's Grid). Later, Reddin added a third dimension by including an "effectiveness" component. The add-on theories of Tuckman's stages of grouo development, Argyris' levels of worker maturity, etc., fit quite well with the model.

The strength of the contingency approaches is that they explain leadership that "depends" on something else--like the criteria questions in Vroom-Yetton-Jago's decision tree or the task structure, position power, or leader-member relations of Fiedler's model. House's Path-Goal theory have not been added to this model yet, but notice that they too have the original task-social outcome criteria making them compatible with this evolution.

So, where is it going? In the next revision, the model will be expanded to include Path-Goal as well as systems theory. The trend seems to be moving from single (trait) explanations, to bi- and tri-polar dimensions, to bifurcations and contingencies, to complex modeling of systems. It's getting much more complicated and ambiguous. Future theories may draw on chaos and complexity theory. I suspect that the same old task-social outcomes will still be present as outcomes, unless we add a larger systems consideration regarding the welfare of the environment.

What do you think?

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David X. Swenson Ph.D.
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Last revised 1-9-00