Identify factors that will influence your choice of leadership styles and explain why your leadership styles are likely to positively affect your team.

Before we look at what leadership styles there are it is important to define what the difference is between management and leadership.

The biggest difference between managers and leaders is the way they motivate people to follow them. Managers have a position within the organisation, their teams work for them to complete tasks and in turn manage situations as they occur. Leaders on the other hand do not have teams when they are leading. Instead, formal control is given up, as to lead is have followers and this is always a voluntary activity. Telling people what to do does not inspire them to follow, rather than to be effective they must want to follow.

Kurt Lewin (1939) led a group of researchers to identify different styles of leadership. While further research has identified more specific types of leadership, this early study was very influential and established three major leadership styles.

• Authoritarian or autocratic • Participative or democratic • Delegative or laissez-fair

Although good leaders use all three styles, with one of them normally dominant, bad leaders tend to stick with one style. When doing my own research into leadership styles I found that we now recognise and use four main subtitles which are: authoritative, consultative, supportive and delegative styles.

Authoritarian leaders provide clear expectations for what needs to be done, when it should be done, and how it should be done. There is also a clear division between the leader and the followers. Authoritarian leaders make decisions independently with little or no input from the rest of the group. Researchers found that decision-making was less creative under authoritarian