The management studies emphasize on good leadership skills. We can find various leaders in our society. Political leaders, business leaders, religious leaders or sports leaders like captains of the teams, etc. A leader is someone who has the ability to inspire people and to get better output.

Leadership styles are basically different approaches to leadership that are used while dealing with people. These approaches are used when a person has an authoritative position. 

There are various leadership approaches that can be divided into three main styles. These styles are discussed below:

In the autocratic leadership style, managers are supposed to control everything by their own. They issue orders and expect that all of the orders will be followed by their subordinates. They keep every information to themselves only and don’t pass it to the employees.  They just pass the necessary instructions to the employees that are required to carry on the work. 

In autocratic style, communication is mainly one way i.e. downward or top to bottom. Decisions are taken by the senior managers and employees are just informed to follow the instructions. 

Democratic leaders allow their employees and subordinates to take part in communication and decision making. They communicate with their employees while taking decisions regarding any situation and not only communicate but consider their views as well if valid and related to the situation.  

Decision making, especially regarding future plans of the organizations, is done after discussion with the employees if the leader is following the democratic leadership style. 

They believe in two-way communication i.e. top to bottom or downward and bottom to top or upward. It is observed that this leadership style is better when the decision comes at the implementation stage.  

Laissez-faire is a French word means “leave to do” or do whatever you want to do. In Laissez-faire leadership style, there is almost all the business objectives of the organizations are discussed with the employees but they are left free to take and implement decisions to get desired results. 

There are various leadership styles that are mainly divided into three categories i.e. autocratic leadership style, democratic leadership style and laissez-faire leadership style. These styles are used according to the nature of the job.

We can have an example of a person who is on a leading position in a law enforcement department like the police or army etc. It is expected that he will use the autocratic leadership style and he will just issue the orders to his subordinates and will not listen to them. he will also not consult them while taking a decision. Although, in the end, he will bear all the responsibility of the task assigned to him. 

In the same way, if someone is working on a leading position in a business organization and he is responsible for planning especially future planning and forecasting, it is expected that he will consult the heads of different departments like finance, sales, marketing, and human resource department, etc. He will also assign the task to his subordinates and listen to their suggestions as well. He will use a democratic leadership style.

The political party’s leadership also follows the democratic leadership style as the political leadership at every level, has to listen to their members while taking any particular situation. They consult them as well when making policies related to health, education, social welfare, etc. 

Sometimes the nature of the job demands free hand to provide the results. It usually happens in sales. Most of the times the sales manager asks the salespersons to achieve the sales target. They give them free hand in achieving the sales target. They just give them the responsibilities of some products and assign them some area or zone. In the area or zone, the salesperson has a free hand and he does whatever he wants but it is his responsibility to meet the sales target given by the sales manager. In this situation, the laissez-faire leadership style will be used by the manager as it is a requirement of the nature of the job.