Imagine you’re running into some problems with your boss at work. Although you feel like you can do your job quite independently, your manager doesn’t seem to agree: they are overbearing, constantly checking if you’re on task, and not too trusting of you—making you want to hide in your cubicle. Although this hands-on approach might work well for your less-focused team members, you’re already hitting all of the marks, turning this “extra motivation” into more of a nuisance than anything else. In this scenario, situational leadership theory (SLT) could help your manager adjust their style to better match your needs and preferences.

Situational leadership theory (SLT) resists jumping to the conclusion that any particular leadership style is better than another. Instead, what really defines leadership is how a manager may adapt to the situation by considering their employees’ abilities. According to SLT, these situational adaptations apply in one-on-one or team settings. This workplace-centric theory goes one step further than just considering workplace factors—it's all about the people you work with. 

Maturity Levels

When applying SLT to the workplace, a leader must start by considering how mature their team members are, which is defined by rating them on two components: competence (skills and knowledge) and commitment (motivation and confidence). Each employee’s maturity level may influence how much a manager needs to intervene, give clear instructions, and work closely with them to help them achieve their goals. The four possible maturity levels are as follows:¹

1. High maturity (M4): High competence and high commitment. These employees are highly skilled, experienced, and confident in their ability to perform tasks independently. Their strong motivation and sense of responsibility enable them to take ownership of their work with minimal supervision.
2. Moderate-high maturity (M3):  High competence and variable commitment. These employees are capable and possess the necessary skills to perform tasks but may lack consistent confidence or motivation, possibly due to uncertainty or other external factors.
3. Moderate-low maturity (M2): Some competence and low commitment. These employees may have a basic understanding of their tasks or partial experience but lack the willingness to take on responsibilities independently, often due to low motivation or fear of failure.
4. Low maturity (M1): Low competence and low commitment. These employees are either new to their role or unfamiliar with the task and require significant guidance and motivation. Their enthusiasm may be high but is not yet matched by the skills or confidence needed for success. 

Leadership Styles

In order to understand and address these various maturity levels, there are two corresponding dimensions of behavior that leaders can fall on:²

1. Task behavior refers to the extent to which a leader provides direction to employees. High task behavior involves giving clear, detailed instructions on what tasks need to be done, how to perform them, and when they should be completed, with close supervision throughout. Low task behavior, on the other hand, allows employees more autonomy, offering minimal guidance and trusting them to take ownership of how and when tasks are completed.
2. Relationship behavior refers to the extent to which a leader engages with employees on a personal and supportive level. High relationship behavior is characterized by close collaboration, fostering open dialogue, actively listening, providing regular feedback, and recognizing progress to build trust and confidence. In contrast, low relationship behavior involves a more distant approach, with the leader engaging less frequently and focusing primarily on outcomes rather than interpersonal connection or support.

A given leader can be rated on each of these dimensions ranging from “low” to “high,” which is frequently visualized as a two-by-two matrix:
This matrix sheds light on the four types of leadership styles, where each approach falls into a quadrant relative to their levels of task and relationship behaviors. The four leadership styles are as follows: ²

1. Delegating style (S4): Low task behavior and low relationship behavior. Leaders take a hands-off approach, allowing employees to take full ownership of tasks and decision-making. This style works best with high-maturity (M4) employees, as they are confident, experienced, and motivated to work independently.
2. Participating style (S3): Low task behavior and high relationship behavior. Leaders collaborate closely with employees, providing support and encouragement while allowing them to take the lead. This style is most effective for moderate-high maturity (M3) employees, helping to build confidence and maintain motivation through active engagement.
3. Selling style (S2): High task behavior and high relationship behavior. Leaders provide clear direction and explain tasks in a persuasive, motivating manner to help employees overcome hesitation or lack of confidence. This approach is ideal for moderate-low maturity (M2) employees, as they benefit from both guidance and encouragement to build their skills and willingness.
4. Telling style (S1): High task behavior and low relationship behavior. Leaders give explicit instructions and closely supervise employees to ensure tasks are completed correctly. This style is suited for low-maturity (M1) employees who require step-by-step direction and support to develop their abilities and confidence.

Putting Maturity Levels and Leadership Styles Together

It can be confusing to keep track of all of these different maturity levels in connection to the leadership styles. We can simply understand how these ideas correspond to each other as follows:²

Understanding these four quadrants can help a leader determine how prepared an employee is for taking on a task relative to their capabilities, a concept called performance readiness. We may further understand performance readiness as an employee’s task execution when considering both their ability and willingness relative to the job.³ We can see all of this come together as such:

Performance readiness: The ability and willingness of an employee to perform a specific task at work. Performance readiness is defined by a given leadership style in relation to an employee’s maturity. Critically, higher performance readiness is found when an employee is more self-directed than leader-directed, while low performance readiness is seen when an employee is less self-directed than leader-directed.

Scientific management: An approach Frederick W. Taylor developed in the late nineteenth century where scientific methods are brought into a workplace to enhance productivity. Unlike social learning theory, scientific management is rooted in the assumption that there is a single best way to complete a given task.

Human relations theory: A human-centered approach that emphasizes social elements when considering job satisfaction and productivity in a workplace. This theory posits that motivation is not only about finances—it is about the quality of relationships, attitudes, and types of leadership styles present in a company’s success, similar to how SLT emphasizes human interactions.

Autocratic leadership style: A method of leading where a manager has complete control over all decisions in a workplace, giving employees little to no voice similar to the telling style from SLT. Though autocratic leadership may be more efficient than other styles, it can decrease employee morale.

Democratic leadership style: Also known as participative or shared leadership, this style is the opposite of autocratic: all employees at a workplace are a part of making decisions, similar to the participating style in SLT. A democratic style can be positive for productivity, more active contributions from everyone, and higher morale overall.⁵

Laissez-faire leadership style: Emerging from the gaps found with autocratic and democratic leadership styles, this third style is a “hands-off” approach where employees make their own decisions, closely resembling the delegating style from SLT. Stemming from the French phrase “allow to do,” laissez-faire leaders provide minimal supervision, allow for more autonomy, and are often relevant in creative work contexts.

Looking back to the early 1990s, situational leadership theory finds its roots in the dynamic history of psychology and research of the workplace. Before SLT, American engineer Frederick W. Taylor was curious about how employees could be more productive on the job. Taylor’s theory fell into the field of scientific management,⁴ a field coined by Taylor where empirical data can be systematically applied to leading an organization. This approach influenced the development of task behaviors now outlined in SLT today. An opposing method emerged during the Great Depression from industrial psychologist Elton Mayo, called human relations theory.⁴ Unlike Taylor, Mayo tried to embrace a human-centered perspective, where workers’ suggestions were integrated into the workplace practices themselves—inspiring the relationship behavior dimension of SLT.

While Taylor’s theory assumed that there was such a thing as a “best” style of leadership, Mayo took a step back to look at the worker’s perspective. While both thinkers were important in setting the foundations for social learning theory, at the time, they were considered to be taking contradictory approaches. As a result, a third theory emerged in the 1940s, as American psychologist Ralph Stogdill set out to determine what the best leadership style may be (or if there even was one in the first place).⁴ In an enormous effort dubbed “the Ohio State studies,” including thousands of managers spanning various industries, Stogdill and colleagues asked leaders two questions:

1. Was a manager successful, and did their team hit their productivity goals?
2. Was a manager effective, and how was their team’s experience working underneath them?

From these questions, Stogdill identified several types of leadership that today we can consider to be “predecessors” to those in social leadership theory. The autocratic style, as the predecessor of the telling style, had leaders calling the shots without much input from employees, whereas the democratic style, as the predecessor to the participating style, had more open-minded managers interested in team members’ involvement. Stogdill discovered a third type of leadership, too: the laissez-faire style, a predecessor to the delegating style. Laissez-faire leaders were hands-off, often assigning decision-making power to various team members. 

In search of the “best” style of leadership, can you guess what the Ohio State studies concluded? There is no single best way to lead! Stogdill proposed that while autocratic managers were both successful and effective in some cases, so were democratic or laissez-faire managers. Stogdill’s work was crucial to SLT’s evolution, as his discoveries created the blueprint for the leadership style grid. 

Harvard professor Chris Argyris was also a significantly influential thinker leading up to the birth of SLT, especially regarding the performance readiness continuum of the theory. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Argyris looked into how factors like confidence and individual efforts had an impact on teams who were asked to do tasks over time. Argyris noticed that when starting a task, teams usually respond better to autocratic leadership. Meanwhile, as a team might get more familiar with a task, the other two styles became preferable: democratic and laissez-faire. Argyris’s discussions surrounding employee maturity (or lack thereof) relative to a given task were one of the final building blocks needed for SLT to finally be formed.

Following Argylis’s influence, the co-founders of SLT, Hersey and Blanchard, connected on the Ohio University campus in the 1960s. Dr. Paul Hersey was a tenured professor at Ohio University (OU), where he taught a course on organizational behavior that was widely sought out by students.⁴ Around the same time, Dr. Ken Blanchard was beginning his administrative role at OU, when he was told he had to take many courses to become acquainted with the school. After hearing about Hersey’s popular organizational behavior class, Blanchard requested to audit the course. Although Hersey at first found this arrangement odd, this mere audit soon enough blossomed into Blanchard and Hersey writing a book together in 1969 based on the class curriculum. Management of Organizational Behavior came to be the best-selling text on organizational behavior in history.  

In the 1970s, Henry and Blanchard developed a theory that set itself apart from conventional leadership approaches by positing that there was no “best” style. Rather, there are dimensions that need to be considered with each style: the leader’s behavior in how directive or supportive they are relative to the follower’s readiness in terms of how capable and willing they are to do something. Henry and Blanchard asserted these dimensions in the 1970s, along with the four styles themselves.⁴ A key part of how SLT developed was how it was easily practiced, presented, and made into training. It was in the 1980s that SLT became popular in organizational contexts and in leadership studies—helping companies all over the globe acquire nuance in their understanding of leadership.

But where does SLT find itself today? The leadership model continues its legacy over 50 years since its inception, with over 15 million managers having completed some form of SLT training.⁴  Elements like globalization, technological advancements, and expanding diversity in the workplace (both the nature of work and the employees themselves) have demonstrated that more conventional leadership theories are not enough to keep up with all of these changes.⁶ What may uphold the ubiquity of SLT is its dynamic, adaptable nature in an ever-changing work world—where its ability to improve team morale and productivity, guide organizational change, and ultimately help managers grow and develop will always keep it relevant.⁷

Dr. Paul Hersey

An American behavioral scientist and entrepreneur who co-developed social learning theory. Hersey has been heavily involved in leadership training in many contexts. Hersey was a tenured professor at Ohio University in the 1960s, teaching organizational behavior courses when he met Blanchard as an auditing university administrator before the two began collaborating.

Dr. Ken Blanchard

An American author, business consultant, and speaker who has written over 70 books and is the other co-founder of social learning theory. Blanchard met Hersey when auditing his popular organizational behavior course, approaching Hersey with the idea to develop the course into a full text—Management of Organizational Behavior. Blanchard is also known for his other best-seller, The One Minute Manager. 

Frederick Winslow Taylor 

An American mechanical engineer who focused on ways to improve industrial efficiency, namely the scientific management approach. Taylor’s book, The Principles of Scientific Management, suggested how strategic management should intertwine scientific methods to run a truly successful business. Taylor was key in setting the stage for researching efficiency at work, which later promoted the consideration of other parts of work, such as leadership styles.

Elton Mayo 

An Australian psychologist best known for his work on industrial and organizational research. Mayo was a key thinker in the foundations of human relations theory, which brought in other elements aside from work productivity, such as social interactions. He is famous for his work on the Hawthorne Studies in the 1920s and 1930s, shedding light on how employees respond to managers' level of supervision, such as in theories like SLT.

Ralph Stogdill

An American psychologist who was Professor Emeritus of Management Science and Psychology at Ohio State University. Stogdill is internationally recognized for his research on leadership and organizations, and his 1940s research on precursors of SLT leadership styles was critical to the theory’s evolution.

Chris Argyris 

An American business theorist and professor at both Yale School of Management and Harvard Business School. Argyris’s theory on the maturity of workers was integrated into SLT. Argyris’ research and writing from the 1960s onward was influential in understanding how individuals behave when managed in organizations. 

Situational leadership theory has had a massive influence on how we perceive leaders and their styles, influencing our conception of what leadership looks like today. Due to SLT, there are much broader versions of what an effective leader can look like and how their chosen style for a specific employee or team can find congruence with company success. 

Adaptability 

Inherent in its definition, social learning theory is a flexible and customizable way to lead that can be adopted by managers in almost every field. The four leadership styles are intended to be dynamic, just like the nature of work itself. A manager may pick and adjust their leadership style over the course of a given workday, depending on the employee and their assigned tasks. No singular leadership style needs to be followed; a true “situational” leader changes their approach depending on the readiness and growth level of their team members.

SLT allows leaders to individualize each employee’s maturity level to task and relationship behaviors. While other leadership models may suggest that a specific style is “the best one,” SLT instead adapts: some team members might require being within an arm’s reach to instill confidence, while others can work independently with little to no direction. These differences in employees’ confidence, abilities, and need for supervision are more than acceptable—it is inherent to an effective workplace, demanding leaders to recognize how and when to change their style to most effectively support their team.

Communication

We can probably all think of times when our manager communicated in a way we weren’t exactly happy with. Luckily, situational learning theory allows leaders to accommodate how they communicate depending on the employee, the team, and the task at hand. A situational manager is able to take a step back to see how much support, guidance, and encouragement is necessary.  Some ways this approach achieves this is by recognizing unique individual and team needs, communicating instructions, tailoring feedback, and changing communication style depending on the audience. 

Job Satisfaction

An impact of situational learning theory that has clear empirical support is its positive and meaningful effect on job satisfaction.^{8, 9} In the past, managers weren’t always open to catering their style of leading to fit their team’s needs, skills, or attitude. Alternatively, SLT allows employees to feel like work is a “two-way street” in terms of being involved with decision-making, sharing their own ideas, and easily understanding what they are being told.^{8, 9}

Some specifics on how situational leadership positively impacts job satisfaction include more employee engagement via active participation, better employee performance, boosting employee retention, and having employees increase their commitment to the job.8 Happiness at work often comes from combining freedom and overall autonomy with the ability to receive guidance and feedback whenever necessary—a delicate balance that SLT takes into account.

Any popular theory is also one of contention. Social learning theory is prone to its fair share of controversies, spanning from issues with being too simple, inconsistencies with leader behavior, and risks surrounding favoritism.

Oversimplification

Like many models, situational learning theory sounds great, well, in theory: leaders can adapt the way they manage to each employee. But in practice, we know this is not the case, as SLT may be reducing many situational elements to be simpler than they really are. This model poses the risk of overlooking complex realities, especially when it comes to individual and cultural differences.

Although SLT asserts there are four leadership styles for managers and four levels of maturity for team members, what if there are more? This is just one example of possible individual differences to consider. Meanwhile, considering cultural differences opens up even more issues. Some cultures may not even consider individual differences at all—where collective behaviors matter the most. Such distinctions like individualism versus collectivism are only the tip of the iceberg, where other cultural dimensions like the normative amount of power between manager and employee, amount of uncertainty permitted, and time orientation (e.g., long vs. short) may come into play, too.

Does Your Boss Really Lead the Same Way Everyday? 

Riddle me this: have you ever had a manager who leads with perfect consistency in their approach, support, and guidance to you? If so, I’d like to meet them—but for the vast majority of us, this is not plausible. Social learning theory may consider how a leader adjusts their style depending on a given worker’s attitude, motivations, and abilities… yet it fails to consider how these frequent changes can be seen as inconsistent—or outright confusing. For many of us, consistency is key in forming trusting attitudes in our management, which can often be the root of cognitive biases we have about wanting things to stay as they currently are at work. 

In short, constantly changing leadership styles can be confusing, especially for new employees. Imagine a new manager of yours going around the office during the first week on the job to get opinions on their employees with a highly involved style, but then you notice how, in the coming weeks, this same manager hardly provides guidance. Hearing about inconsistencies like these in how a new manager leads may negatively impact not only trust in leadership but of other employees being truthful as well. In some cases, sticking to an overarching leadership style with reasonable room for flexibility may be what is best for a workplace.

Playing Favorites 

Sometimes, it can be painfully obvious who your favorite colleague is in the eyes of your manager. Unfortunately, situational learning theory might be one reason why favoritism becomes apparent when a leader begins to prefer some employees over others based on their maturity level outlined in the model. Of course, tensions can arise when neglected employees sense their lack of popularity amongst management. 

A possible problem with SLT here is that leaders may only be effective at one or two of the leadership styles, which in turn only aligns with a fraction of the work attitudes and capabilities of team members. Say, for instance, a manager is clearly using the delegating style most of the time, which assumes that a more hands-off approach will work best for highly mature employees. Colleagues who want more support may quickly feel disregarded or even that they cannot receive guidance—let alone get a chance at becoming a favorite employee one day. We must remind ourselves that although at times one leadership style may work best, the remaining three styles may be more appropriately applied to other scenarios.

Teachers have Leaders, Too

In our early years of education, some of the first leaders we encounter are teachers. At developmentally critical ages, especially as we start to develop our own opinions and feelings, we can all remember our favorite teachers—and our least favorite ones, too. At this stage, we may be blind to how teachers also have leaders, namely school principals. In the late 1980s, applied psychologist Vecchio investigated how teachers may be impacted by the SLT leadership styles that principals adopt.¹⁰

In a study of over 300 teachers from more than a dozen high schools, Vecchio quantified several elements that are important to teachers and their supervisors. These elements were namely the supervisory style of the principal, teacher maturity, how satisfied teachers were with supervision, and the quality of principal-teacher interactions. Based on SLT, Vecchio discovered something that an employee in any field might relate to: it was only specific teachers that seemed to uphold the theory. In particular, teachers who were most recently hired may require and appreciate higher task structuring from their principal. Teachers' job performance, which had already been on the job for some time and had more maturity, had little to do with their principals’ leadership style.

A decade later, the same researcher and his colleague replicated the study with a slightly different demographic: university employees.¹⁰ Similar results were found in another sample of over 300 university employees and their 32 supervisors—it seems that SLT fails to consider more seasoned employees. What the authors suggest is that although SLT may indeed be intuitive in its appeal, it lacks the ability to sufficiently address how employees of higher maturity are positively impacted by various leadership styles. This goes beyond the education realm, too: Vecchio and colleagues discovered the same finding another ten years later with banking employees.¹¹

Do these results suggest that some employees become jaded after years of work, reaching a point where the leadership style no longer significantly impacts how they approach their tasks? For jobs like teaching, we would like to think this is not the case. Perhaps what is missing instead is some other leadership styles that were not exhaustive within the Hersey–Blanchard SLT model. A curious project would be to fine-tune leadership styles for specific jobs and industries to see how industry differences may be bound to further nuanced styles of leaders.

Beyond Traditional SLT Contexts: Leaders in Finance 

Since the Hersey-Blanchard connection in the late 1960s and the birth of their beloved SLT in the 1970s, there have been some common testing grounds for the theory’s efficacy: education, healthcare, and armed forces. Some may find that the leadership styles and their applicability to these three settings are sufficient enough to accept the model entirely, but what if other contexts need to be investigated first?

Norwegian business researchers Thompson and Glasø set out with the purpose of examining how challenging it is to understand employee competence and commitment in SLT.¹¹ In doing so, the authors presented various perspectives on identifying employee development levels to test the validity of SLT. In a study of over 350 employees and 80 supervisors in financial organizations, Thompson and Glasø hoped to give a point-out-view beyond the usual service-oriented ones. 

What these researchers found is that it's all about the extent of agreement between a leader’s rating of an employee's competence and that employee’s rating of their own competence. In other words, when leaders and employees have congruence between these ratings, SLT is more likely to be accurate. Some important afterthoughts from this case study may be how the independent ratings of work performance from leader and follower separately and then the joint comparison of such may foster effective degrees of guidance and support. 

We now see in plain view how SLT can be put into practice in versatile contexts. From a finance perspective, like many other industries, it seems that the communication between a leader and their employee, as well as measuring different types of achievements at work, is key. This is an implication that goes far beyond the realms of SLT, where any sound communication amongst coworkers often leads to better results.

Why We Sometimes Favor Aggressive Political Leadership

Leaders are present at all levels of our society, not only in our workplaces. In this piece, TDL columnist Kaylee Sommerville discusses some reasons why aggressive political leaders win against their competition. She emphasizes some possible biases to consider, as well as dissects how aggressive leaders behave in elections.

Charismatic Leadership

Are you lucky enough to have a leader who is genuinely charismatic and beloved? In this reference guide, TDL writer Emilie Rose Jones explains charismatic leadership, including what it means, the history of charisma itself, as well as the risks of blindly falling for charisma.

1. The Situational Leadership Model: How It Works. (2024, October 17). Investopedia. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/hersey-and-blanchard-model.asp#:~:text=The%20Situational%20Leadership%20Model%20focuses,how%20best%20to%20direct%20them
2. Shriver, E. (2023, August 24). The four leadership styles of situational leadership®. Situational Leadership® Management and Leadership Training. https://situational.com/blog/the-four-leadership-styles-of-situational-leadership/
3. Performance Readiness is a Relative Term. (n.d.). Situational. https://situational.com/blog/performance-readiness-is-a-relative-term/
4. The History of the Situational Leadership® Framework. (n.d.). Situationship. https://situational.com/blog/the-history-of-the-situational-leadership-framework/
5. Amanchukwu, R. N.,  Stanley, G. J., & Ololube, N. P. (2015). A Review of Leadership Theories, Principles and Styles and Their Relevance to Educational Management. 2015. 6-14. 10.5923/j.mm.20150501.02. 
6. Why Situational Leadership Matters Today More Than Ever. (n.d.). The University of Manchester Middle East Centre. https://www.manchester.ac.ae/blog/why-situational-leadership-matters-today-more-ever#:~:text=Today%2C%20where%20uncertainty%20is%20the,demands%20of%20any%20given%20situation
7. McHugh, B. (2024, August 12). Council post: Situational leadership practices: Essential for today's leaders. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbescoachescouncil/2024/03/11/situational-leadership-practices-essential-for-todays-leaders/
8. Pasaribu S.B., Goestjahjanti F.S., Srinita S., Novitasari D. and Haryanto B. (2022). The Role of Situational Leadership on Job Satisfaction, Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB), and Employee Performance. Front. Psychol. 13:896539. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.896539
9. Nugroho, B. S., Suheri, Hakim, L., Irawan, B., Sholehuddin, M. S., Ibrahim, T., et al. (2020b). Effect of knowledge sharing dan leader member exchange (LMX) and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) to Indonesian lectures' performance. Syst Rev Pharm. 11 doi: 10.31838/srp.2020.9.141
10. Vecchio, R. P. (1987). Situational Leadership Theory: An examination of a prescriptive theory. Journal of Applied Psychology, 72(3), 444–451. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.72.3.444
11. Thompson, G. & Glasø, R. (2015), "Situational leadership theory: a test from three perspectives", Leadership & Organization Development Journal, Vol. 36 Iss 5 pp. 527 - 544 Permanent link to this document: http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/LODJ-10-2013-0130