Much popular leadership advice treats "leadership style" as a fixed personal trait — you're either a directive leader or a delegating one, an authoritative type or a collaborative type, and the goal is figuring out which one you are and doubling down on it. Situational leadership theory, developed by Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard, rejects that entire premise. The right leadership style, in this model, isn't a fixed personal quality at all — it changes depending on the specific person being led and their readiness for the specific task at hand, which means an effective leader might need to use several different styles in the same day with different people.
Readiness, not personality, is the variable that matters
Hersey and Blanchard's model centres on a follower's "readiness" or "maturity" for a particular task, defined by a combination of their competence (do they have the skill and experience to do it well) and their commitment (are they confident and motivated to do it). Critically, readiness is treated as task-specific rather than a fixed trait of the person — someone might have high readiness for one task and low readiness for another, entirely different one, even within the same job, which means the same employee might genuinely need a different leadership approach depending on which specific task they're tackling.
Four styles matched to four readiness levels
The model pairs four leadership styles with four corresponding readiness levels. For low-readiness followers (low competence, variable commitment), a directing style — giving specific instructions and closely supervising — fits best, since the follower genuinely needs clear guidance. As readiness increases to moderate levels, a coaching style blends direction with explanation and encouragement, then a supporting style shifts toward facilitating and collaborating as competence grows but confidence may still need building. For high-readiness followers who have both the skill and the confidence to work independently, a delegating style — largely stepping back and letting them run with it — becomes the appropriate approach, since close supervision at that point would be unnecessary and potentially even counterproductive. The theory's central claim is that mismatching the style to the readiness level in either direction — over-directing a highly capable person, or under-supporting someone who genuinely needs more guidance — tends to produce worse outcomes than getting the match right.
What we're still unsure about
Situational leadership theory is widely taught and applied in management training, and its central intuition — that different followers and tasks may call for different leadership approaches — is broadly accepted as reasonable. What's more genuinely contested in organisational research is how strong the empirical evidence actually is for the model's specific structure: some scholars argue the theory has more intuitive plausibility and practical popularity than it has rigorous supporting data, and the difficulty of precisely and reliably measuring a follower's "readiness" in practice — as opposed to a leader's subjective impression of it — remains a genuine limitation researchers continue to grapple with when trying to test the model's predictions systematically.
This sits inside Leadership Theories (Transformational, Situational), one of seven topics in Management, one of four domains in Business, one of seventeen subjects the app can quiz you on.