Laissez-faire leadership

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. ... 

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... 

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 vast majority of the civil service employees who labor in the lower echelons of the agencies are conscientious and competent public servants who accomplish a great deal with very limited resources. When the leadership of government agencies placed laissez faire ideology over professionalism, however, the result was often incompetent government. The rampant incompetence of... 

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