Types of Leaders Across the Organizational Hierarchy: A Person-Centered Approach

Leadership pipeline research typically has taken a “skill-centered” approach to describe the changing skill requirements across management positions. However, the current study advances previous research by taking a “person-centered” approach to investigate the prevalence of different leader types along the organizational hierarchy. Based on an inverse principle components analysis, this study identified three unique patterns of skill configuration. We labeled the three leader types: (a) Driven Experts, (b) Principled Partners, and (c) Charismatic Advocates. It was found that the prevalence of one type (Principled Partners) decreased across organizational levels, whereas the other two types (Driven Experts and Charismatic Advocates) increased in the prevalence from the low to high management levels. The implications of the findings on leadership development are discussed.