Life Cycle Leadership Theory: Some Empirical Evidence

Initiating Structure and Consideration provide a simple, powerful and popular way of describing the behaviour of leaders. Tile determination of leader effectiveness poses added methodological and theoretical demands for the researcher, however. Hersey and Blanchard's “Life Cycle Leadership Theory” represents one such approach. The study reported below, conducted in Toronto, tested two hypotheses that suggested inverse relationships between maturity level of teachers and the degree to which they prefer task‐oriented and relationships‐oriented leader behavior. Limited support was found for the hypotheses but the authors discern some important trends and suggest relevant areas for future research.