5 Unique Leadership Styles That Can Transform Your Team

Managers can be the make-it-or-break-it for your organization.

We all know managers are multipliers. Leaders have the ability to create behavior change, drive business outcomes, and cement well-oiled teams in success. At the same time, poorly managers can be your biggest risk factor and skill gap. 

In fact, one study found that bad management could lead to $500B in economic losses in the US alone.

At its heart, how your managers communicate, delegate, give feedback, and respond to pressure has a direct ripple effect on engagement, performance, and retention across your entire organization.

Yet most leadership development programs still treat leadership as a fixed trait rather than a learnable, adaptable skill set. The reality is more nuanced and more useful. 

Different situations call for different approaches. Different people on the same team need different kinds of leadership at different times.

Research consistently backs this up. A 2025 study published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications found that leadership style directly influences employee engagement and performance outcomes, with no single approach working equally well across all contexts.

That's why understanding the full range of leadership styles matters, not just for individual managers, but for HR and L&D leaders building programs that develop the right capabilities across an entire workforce.

This guide covers five of the most impactful and nuanced leadership styles available today, how each one affects team dynamics, and how leaders can identify which approach fits them best.

5 Unique Leadership Styles

While textbooks often list a dozen or more types of leadership styles, five stand out for their practical impact on modern, complex teams: 

• Transformational leadership 
• Situational leadership 
• Servant leadership 
• Charismatic leadership 
• Laissez-faire leadership 

Each operates from a different set of assumptions about how people are motivated, how decisions should be made, and where a leader's focus belongs.

Understanding each style in depth gives HR and L&D leaders a stronger foundation for identifying gaps, designing programs, and coaching managers toward the behaviors that drive real outcomes.

Transformational Leadership

Transformational leaders inspire teams by connecting everyday work to a larger purpose. They set high expectations, model the behaviors they want to see, and invest in the individual growth of each team member. The goal is not just task completion but genuine development.

The research support for this approach is substantial. A 2024 study published in Frontiers in Psychology found that in project-based organizations, transformational leadership positively correlates with higher performance, team innovation, and job satisfaction. 

A separate 2024 Emerald Publishing study found that transformational leadership has a significant direct effect on employee engagement and, in turn, on employee retention.

For L&D teams, transformational leadership offers a clear connection to learning investment. Leaders who practice individualized consideration naturally become advocates for upskilling and reskilling because helping people grow is central to the style, not peripheral to it.

Where this style has limits: it requires significant time and relational investment from the leader. In environments that need rapid decisions or have deeply routine workflows, the transformational approach can feel misaligned with daily realities.

Situational Leadership

Situational leadership, developed by Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard in the 1960s, holds that there is no single best way to lead. 

Effective leaders assess the competence and commitment of each team member for each specific task and adjust their style accordingly, moving between directing, coaching, supporting, and delegating based on what that person needs in that moment.

As the EBSCO Research overview of situational leadership theory explains, the model identifies four levels of follower readiness, from those who need detailed instruction and close oversight to those who are self-sufficient and simply need autonomy to deliver. 

Matching leadership style to readiness level is what the model is built on.

A 2025 review published in MDPI confirmed that positive outcomes associated with the situational leadership model include improvements in organizational climate, job satisfaction, and responsiveness to uncertainty, which are all critical factors in today's workforce environment.

For CHROs and VP-level HR leaders, situational leadership has practical value as a framework for manager training. 

It gives managers a diagnostic tool: before responding to an employee, assess their actual development level on the task at hand, then choose the behavior that fits. This reduces one-size-fits-all management and helps address the skills gaps that often go unaddressed because managers assume competence where none yet exists.

Servant Leadership

Servant leadership flips the conventional hierarchy. 

Rather than directing from the top, servant leaders ask a simpler question: what do my people need to do their best work? The leader's role becomes one of removing obstacles, providing resources, and fostering an environment where team members can grow and succeed.

The research on servant leadership and employee outcomes is strong. According to data, 85% of employees in organizations practicing servant leadership report higher engagement levels, 80% express higher loyalty to their organization, and 88% say servant leadership promotes a positive workplace culture.

A 2024 MDPI study on servant leadership and work engagement found a significant positive correlation between servant leadership and employee work engagement, with effects mediated by employee resilience and organizational support — two factors that directly influence a team's ability to navigate change and pressure.

In the context of emotional intelligence training, servant leadership is a natural complement. 

Both frameworks center empathy, self-awareness, and attending to others' needs as the foundation of effective leadership. Organizations that develop servant leadership capabilities often find it accelerates psychological safety and helps close interpersonal skill gaps across teams.

Charismatic Leadership

Charismatic leaders generate energy. They communicate with conviction, project confidence, and have a natural ability to mobilize people around a compelling vision. Teams led by charismatic leaders often feel motivated by something larger than their immediate tasks.

The 2025 research from Humanities and Social Sciences Communications referenced above found that charismatic leadership had a more substantial impact on employee engagement than democratic leadership, which is an important data point for HR leaders thinking about which leadership qualities to prioritize in high-stakes or turnaround situations.

However, charismatic leadership comes with real risks when it isn't balanced with other competencies. Charismatic leaders who lack self-awareness can create cultures of dependency, where team members defer to the leader rather than developing their own judgment. Strong coaching programs can help charismatic leaders build the reflective practices that make their natural strengths more durable and less personality-dependent.

The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs 2025 report identifies leadership and social influence as a core skill cited by 61% of employers. Charismatic leaders tend to have this in abundance.

The development question is how to ensure it's grounded in genuine emotional intelligence rather than performance alone.

Laissez-Faire Leadership

Laissez-faire leadership grants team members significant autonomy. Leaders who use this style delegate broadly, minimize oversight, and trust their people to manage their own work. In the right circumstances, it creates space for high performers to innovate, take ownership, and grow.

The key phrase is "in the right circumstances." Research comparing leadership styles consistently shows that laissez-faire works well with experienced, self-directed teams whose members have high competence and high motivation. Applied to less experienced employees or teams that need structure, it tends to produce confusion, disengagement, and performance decline.

This is where situational leadership and laissez-faire intersect usefully.

 Laissez-faire is one mode that effective leaders can shift into when the people and the task call for it. The danger comes from leaders who default to it regardless of context, effectively mistaking disengagement for delegation.

For HR leaders, laissez-faire also raises an important question about accountability. Teams given maximum autonomy still need clarity on goals, outcomes, and feedback loops. 

Building that structure — through tools like shared OKRs or regular check-ins — makes laissez-faire leadership sustainable rather than risky.

The Impact of Leadership Styles on Team Dynamics

Leadership style is not just a management philosophy. It's an operating condition for your teams. The way a manager leads shapes how people communicate, how conflicts get resolved, how innovation happens (or doesn't), and whether employees feel valued enough to stay.

According to Gallup, 70% of the variance in employee engagement is attributable to managers. Leadership style determines whether people bring their full selves to work or mentally check out while remaining physically present.

Research published in the SHS Conferences Proceedings found that different leadership styles produce measurably different team behaviors: transformational leadership drives innovation and stimulates team potential, while democratic approaches improve decision quality and team adaptability. 

The takeaway is not that one style wins. It’s that alignment between leadership style and team context is what drives results.

For organizations investing in collaboration skills training, the leadership layer is critical. Teams can be trained in the mechanics of collaboration, but if their manager's default style undermines trust or creates fear of mistakes, that training struggles to take hold. 

Leadership style sets the cultural conditions that determine whether other development investments stick.

4 Questions to Help Identify Which Leadership Style Works for You

No manager has a single, fixed leadership style. 

Research from the situational leadership model makes this explicit: the most effective leaders are those who can diagnose what a situation requires and adapt accordingly. But knowing your default style is the starting point for any meaningful development.

A few questions worth considering:

• When a team member is struggling, do you move in with direction, or do you ask questions and coach?
• Do you tend to inspire through vision, or through structure and clarity?
• In high-pressure moments, do you take control or distribute decision-making?
• When someone on your team is highly capable, how much autonomy do you actually give them?

These questions aren't just useful for self-reflection. They're the basis of structured leadership development programs that use coaching and expert-matching to help managers identify their patterns, understand their impact, and develop new range.

For leaders, that starts with investment in their own development, not as a one-time workshop, but as an ongoing process of reflection, feedback, and practice.

It's also worth noting that identifying your leadership style isn't the end goal. 

Awareness is the beginning. What follows is the deliberate work of expanding your repertoire, which means developing the ability to use transformational approaches when a team needs inspiration, situational flexibility when needs vary, and servant leadership behaviors when trust and company culture are the priority.

Transforming Your Team Through Effective Leadership

The five leadership styles covered here each offer something distinct. None of them is universally right, and none is permanently wrong. What matters is whether leaders have the self-awareness to understand their defaults and the flexibility to adapt when the situation calls for it.

For CHROs and L&D leaders, the organizational implication is clear. 

Developing leadership style flexibility isn't a soft initiative. It directly affects engagement, your work culture, retention, collaboration, and performance outcomes. And the organizations that treat leadership development as a precision discipline, matching managers with the right experts and measuring behavior change over time, will see more durable results than those that rely on one-time trainings or generic programs.

The Growthspace approach to leadership and management development is built around exactly this: identifying the specific skill gaps that matter most for a leader's context, matching them with the right practitioners, and tracking what actually changes. 

Because knowing which leadership style works is only valuable if you can build the capability to use it.

Ready to build a leadership development program built for real business outcomes? Book a demo to see how Growthspace helps organizations develop leaders at every level.