Laissez-faire leaders

As the Second World War approached, and even more once it had passed, the dangers of unchecked industrial pollution were widely sensed. Engineers and managers inside the chemical industry knew far more than the public, and the leaders of major companies like DuPont and Dow understood the need for action. But the extreme laissez-faire political beliefs of the industry s top management led them to reject federal environmental controls. They insisted that environmental control should be a state and local matter, leaving regulators hobbled by political pressure and the threat that factories could relocate to friendlier jurisdictions. Absent effective outside regulation, the industry would make its own decisions. 

Thus, according to the full range leadership model, every leader displays each style to some degree. Three-dimensional optimal and suboptimal profiles are shown in Figure 3. The depth frequency dimension represents how often a leader displays a style of leadership. The horizontal active imension represents the assumptions of the model according to which the laissez-faire style is the most passive style, whereas transactional leadership incorporates more active styles and transformational leadership is proactive. The vertical effectiveness dimension is based on empirical results that... 

Laissez-faire The leader remains completely passive and allows other operators total freedom in their decisions ... 

How the leader influences—the leader s style—encircles his personal safety ethic. Over the years, researchers and scholars have described a plethora of leadership styles—laissez-faire, autocratic, charismatic, participative, transactional, theories X, Y, and Z—to name just a few. One widely researched style, transformational leadership, stands out as consistently predictive of business outcomes. The transformational leader focuses on the future, and her approach is strongly oriented toward developing her people. By going beyond her own self-interest, such a leader inspires employees to go beyond their mere shortterm self-interest. The transactional leader, in contrast, focuses on current results and undertakes individual exchanges (of recognition, position, or money) to deliver expected results in the near term. We ll explore these two leadership styles, both of which have their merits and uses, later in this chapter. 

The research literature has classified leadership style (the second ring in the Safety Leadership Model) in a number of ways. In recent years, the various dimensions and models have coalesced into two basic styles transformational leadership and transactional leadership. (A third type, laissez-faire leadership, is also mentioned, but it amounts to an abdication of leadership responsibility and is thus not desirable to safety leadership.) There is increasing evidence that transformational and transactional leadership are not mutually exclusive, but that different situations call for different styles. Great leaders are adept at using the mix that is appropriate to a given situation. ... 

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