A Directive Leadership Style in Group Decision Making Can Be Both Virtue and Vice: Evidence From Elite and Experimental Groups

The group dynamics Q-sort was used to investigate the effects of leader directiveness in group decision making. Past research on leadership style has consistently implicated directive leaders as a chief cause of defective process and poor outcomes in group decision making. Leader directiveness was decomposed into 2 components: (a) outcome directiveness (i.e., the degree to which a leader advocates a favored solution) and (b) process directiveness (i.e., the degree to which a leader regulates the process by which the group reaches a decision). Process directiveness emerged as a potent predictor of quality of group process and outcomes. Outcome directiveness was associated with a much smaller and less coherent array of group outcomes. These findings suggest that current prescriptive models of decision making overemphasize the potential harmful effects of outcome directiveness.