In a seminal and much-cited article on the subject of leadership, Lewin, Lippitt, and White (1939) coined the term democratic-style leadership to refer to a method of managing that involved give and take between leaders, or managers, and the people whose jobs they were guiding. Later identified with group leadership, democratic leadership was valorized vis-a-vis autocratic leadership on one side and laissez-faire leadership on the other. One may readily infer the bias in favor of democratic leadership style from the mere naming of the other style terms.
The autocratic style of leadership has been linked to the so-called scientific management methods envisioned by Frederick Taylor, who in the early part of the 20th century was influential in devising a strategy of workplace behavior meant to eliminate uncertainty and chaos in the workplace. The problem was that managers tended to leave employees out of the policy-implementation equation. Supposedly, scientific management would eliminate the adversary relationship between labor and management. Instead, "science, the impartial arbiter, would decide" (Kanigel, 1996, p. 45). Yet "science" inevitably meant top-down, hierarchical management practices: "Taylor's experts and engineers did the thinking, while you were consigned to mindless doing" (Kanigel, 1996, p. 51).
Laissez-faire leadership, as the term implies, fully empowers the group members. The actual leader recedes, but the group is responsible for its decisions. One trouble with that style is that the leader also withdraws as a resource, unless the group specifically asks for help, and intragroup rivalries and competition can develop that can limit group effectiveness (Lewin, Lippitt, & White, 1939). There may be no shared vision about the group's objective. One may also infer the potential for the tyranny of the majority, a term attributed to Tocqueville in his 1839 book Democracy in America. That idea also surfaces in democrat...