An Empirical Taxonomy of Leadership Situations: Development, Validation, and Implications for the Science and Practice of Leadership

The situation plays an important role in leadership, yet there exists no comprehensive, well-accepted, and empirically validated framework for modeling leadership situations. This research used situation ratings and narratives from 1,159 leaders to empirically develop a taxonomy of leadership situations. Natural language processing techniques were used to generate psychological situation characteristics that were then rated by leaders. Factor analyses of leader ratings resulted in a taxonomy of psychological leadership situation characteristics with six dimensions (Positive Uniqueness, Importance, Negativity, Scope, Typicality, and Ease). Topic modeling of leader narratives provided a preliminary accompanying typology of structural leadership situation cue combinations (Market/Business Needs, Barriers to Effectiveness, Interpersonal Resources, Deviations/Changes, Team Objectives, and Logistics). To facilitate the measurement of the perceptions of situations, we developed a 27-item measure of the six dimensions of psychological leadership situation characteristics: the Leadership Situation Questionnaire (LSQ). We used the LSQ to conduct initial tests of the nomological network of psychological leadership situation characteristics by assessing their relationships with leader personality, leader behavior, outcomes of leadership situations, and structural leadership situation cue combinations. The psychological leadership situation characteristics taxonomy and the resulting measure (the LSQ) provide an organizing framework for existing leadership research, lay a foundation for future research on situation-related leadership hypotheses, and offer important practical implications in areas such as leader assessment and development.