The idea of situation based leadership has been around for a long time and is still popular, even if mainly in academic circles.

• The traditional idea is flawed because it presumes that leadership is about how the boss makes decisions. First of all, this conception fails to distinguish between leadership and management. Secondly, leadership is not primarily about making decisions anyway - it is about inspiring people to change direction. It is a change inspiring process not a decision making one.
• Leadership is fundamentally about having the courage (or the indifference to group acceptance) to advocate, or simply take, a direction that diverges from that of your group - it is about inspiring people to change direction.
• More pointedly: How can an individual inspire a group participatively? If a group jointly excites itself then no leadership has been provided by anyone but if one person does the exciting of the others then that person is the leader. Hence there can be no such thing as participative leadership.
• Certainly decisions can be made participatively but this is not leadership. And surely, making decisions autocratically cannot be seen as leadership at all.  
• Leaders may indeed vary the way they inspire people to change but this is when they have already decided on the need to change - hence leadership style does not reduce to decision making style.
• The idea of participative leadership is as silly as the idea of participative motivation. If a person has no desire to do an unfamiliar and difficult task, you may motivate him, by involving him in deciding how to go about the task at an early stage. It is unlikely that the person will say: ''Yes, I do need to be motivated to do this task so please involve me so that I will become motivated.'' If the person is not motivated to do the task in the first place, he is unlikely to be motivated to feel that he should be motivated! - unless you motivate him - hence motivation is either self generated or other generated, not participative.
• Participative leadership is not possible because leadership involves one person persuading others to do something they would not otherwise do. Leadership is always unidirectional. More than one person in a group may show leadership but each instance of leadership has to be to take the group in a slightly different direction or to make a difference in how the group is thinking. If one person simply echoes the original leader then that is followership. So, leadership may shift from one person to another in short order within a group, but each instance of leadership is unidirectional not participative. Another way of putting this point is that there are only two positions: leadership and followership. You have to occupy one position or the other at any one moment in time.
• The problem here is a confusion over how participation is used - is it used to make decisions or to influence others to buy your ideas? If the former, then it is not leadership but management. If the latter, it is leadership but not genuine participation.
• Leaders, in other words, use pseudo-participation as a form of influence - a good tactic no doubt, but this has to be classified as influence rather than real participation - which presupposes that the boss's mind is not already made up.

All pages written by Mitch McCrimmon, Ph.D. and copyright © Self Renewal Group 1996-2008