If you’re a manager, you’ve spent time thinking about your management style. Would you categorize your predominant style as autocratic, democratic, laissez-faire, or facilitative? And do you really have a strong sense of what these styles are, and when it’s appropriate to use them?

In addition to your predominant approach, do you have a versatile palette of styles? Are you able to sense when to use each one and shift between them as needed? How does your use of styles compare with other managers? Do women use styles differently from men? How do styles shift at different management levels? 

Perhaps more importantly, what do you know about how your staff perceives your style? Do they concur with your understanding and use of styles? Do they think the style in which you manage is appropriate and effective? Or do they feel mismanaged? To explore these and related questions, AMA/MCE surveyed 1,139 professionals,
including 905 managers and 234 staff, in the spring of 2024. AMA/MCE’s experts found that managers may not be using management styles as effectively as they think.

The Four Major Management Styles

“More than 80 years ago, Kurt Lewin, the father of social psychology, identified three major management styles—authoritarian, democratic, and laissez-faire,” according to AMA/MCE faculty member Joseph Reed, PhD, an expert in organizational effectiveness with over 30 years’ experience providing training and other services to corporations and institutions. “More recently, researchers have added a fourth: facilitative, and ‘autocratic’ has become common, often replacing ‘authoritarian.’”

Reed says these styles determine how a manager communicates, decides, and exercises power, and have a significant impact on the work that gets done, how it gets done, and what it feels like to be on that manager’s team. He maintains that there is no single best style. ”Rather, managers must shift between them depending on the goal, context, and the team’s qualities,” he says.

With autocratic or authoritarian leaders, the manager does most of the talking. “They decide what to do and how to do it, and they provide explicit instructions to the staff,” Reed says.