Leadership and Empowerment

Leadership is defined as the way of motivating and directing a group of people to jointly work towards achieving common goals and objectives (Helmold & Samara 2019; Fatma 2015). The leader is the person in the group that possesses the combination of personality and leadership skills that makes others want to follow his or her direction. Leadership implies formal and informal power distribution. The Tannenbaum-Schmidt Leadership Continuum is a model showing the relationship between the level of authority you use as a leader and the freedom this allows your team (Tannenbaum & Schmidt 2009). At one end of the continuum are managers who simply tell their employees what to do. At the other end of the continuum are managers who are completely hands off. As you move from one end of the continuum to the other, the level of freedom you give your team will increase, and your use of authority will decrease. Most managers and leaders will lie somewhere in the middle between these two extremes. The Leadership Continuum was developed by Robert Tannenbaum and Warren Schmidt in their 1958 Harvard Business Review (HBR) article: “How to Choose a Leadership Pattern”. Tannenbaum was an organizational psychologist and Professor at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. Schmidt was also a psychologist who taught at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. Most leadership models ring-fence a leadership style and analyse it in isolation from other leadership styles. However, in practice, a single leadership style is not appropriate for all situations. Sometimes you might want to borrow elements of another leadership style to use with an individual within your team. Other times you might completely change your style if the situation requires it. Tannenbaum and Schmidt argued that there are certain questions to be considered when selecting a leadership style (Figs. 6.1 and 6.2):