Every few years, a new adjective gets attached to the word “leadership.” Distributed. Transformational. Adaptive. Authoritarian. Benevolent. Recognition-based. It’s tempting to treat this as fashion, this year’s buzzword replacing last year’s. But a January 2026 literature review from Lyon Metropole’s foresight unit (Direction de la Prospective et du Dialogue Public) makes a more useful point: these six models aren’t competing for the same throne. Each one makes visible something the others don’t, and each one has a context where it works and a context where it quietly fails.
Organizations, public and private, are operating under a level of instability that makes any single, fixed model of authority hard to sustain: accelerating technological and social change, health and geopolitical crises, tighter budgets, and a workforce that expects more say in decisions that affect it. The question worth asking isn’t “which leadership style is correct.” It’s “which one does this specific situation call for, and can I tell the difference?”
A quick distinction first. Leadership and management get used interchangeably, but they’re not the same lever. Management draws its legitimacy from an institutional position: it plans, budgets, organizes, controls, sanctions. Leadership draws its legitimacy from the willingness of others to follow: it convinces, mobilizes, earns adherence. A manager can lack the capacity to lead a team even while holding formal authority over it. And a leader, in the strict sense, doesn’t need a title at all. The two aren’t opposed; management without leadership tends toward rigidity, leadership without management tends toward powerlessness. Six models below sit somewhere on that spectrum.
1. Distributed leadership
Distributed leadership starts from a simple observation: the myth of the single heroic leader, the “providential man” who unites the troops through sheer force of personality, rarely survives contact with a real organization. Research on this model (notably a case study inside a French public research institute, INRA/INRIA) shows leadership working better when it’s split across roles: the person who generates ideas, the person who rallies people, the person who diffuses innovation into the wider organization, rather than concentrated in one person. Nobody is competing for “the” leadership role; each role is complementary to the others, and the split isn’t fixed. It shifts with the mission, the period, the people involved.
Where it earns its keep: complex, multi-stakeholder, project-based organizations where autonomy is already high and a single command point would be a bottleneck. Where it gets shaky: there’s no clear evidence of how large an organization can get before “distributed” becomes “diluted,” a leadership so spread out it can no longer pull anyone in a shared direction.
2. Transformational leadership
Studied extensively inside Swiss public administration (Yves Emery and David Giauque, University of Lausanne), transformational leadership is what shows up when an organization tries to move past pure “transactional” management (set the objective, check the result, reward or sanction) toward something that mobilizes people around a shared vision and develops their skills over time. It leans hard on the question of meaning: not what to do or how, but why it matters, especially in public-sector contexts where the mission is framed around collective interest rather than quarterly numbers.
It isn’t meant to replace every other form of leadership. The researchers explicitly describe organizations needing a mix, technical/transactional leadership included. And it runs into real friction in cultures where standing out from the collective isn’t rewarded, or where technical competence is prized over the softer skills of mobilizing and sustaining motivation.
3. Adaptive leadership
Ronald Heifetz (Harvard) coined “adaptive work” back in 1994: the learning required to close the gap between the values people hold and the reality they’re actually facing. His key distinction is worth sitting with. Some problems have known technical answers: you defer to the expert, the answer exists. Others don’t (a war, an epidemic, a genuinely new kind of crisis), and no expert can hand you the fix. Adaptive leadership is what’s needed in that second category. It treats flexibility, continuous learning, and honest experimentation as the actual job, and names something most leadership models skip past: the predictable, very human urge to avoid the discomfort of adaptive work altogether, and the leader’s job of not letting people off that hook.
It shows up heavily in crisis literature (COVID accelerated the research), but it isn’t only for crises. It’s also meant to run continuously, before the crisis arrives, building the muscle of resilience in calmer times. Its risk, named directly in the research: leadership by permanent change can tip into organizational fatigue, a real psychosocial risk if every process is treated as up for adaptation, all the time.
4. Authoritarian leadership
The oldest model on the list, and the one still most likely to get defended in a boardroom under a different name. Authoritarian leadership fuses the figure of the manager and the leader through a posture of firmness: legitimacy comes from the institution’s grant of authority, not from the collective’s recognition of it. Recent French research (Deslandes & Bouilloud, ESCP) connects its persistence to shifting gender dynamics in management, and to what one contributor bluntly called a “reactionary” pull back toward a hegemonic idea of what a strong manager looks like.
It isn’t without a legitimate use case, though: Heifetz’s own framework grants that when procedures are well-established and the situation calls for speed and consistency rather than reinvention, vertical authority is genuinely the right tool. It protects, it restores order, it reassures a team that needs a clear frame more than it needs a debate. The risk is applying it to situations that actually call for adaptation, where the same firmness that reassures in a crisis becomes an obstacle to the creativity the moment requires.
5. Benevolent leadership
Since the 2000s, “benevolence” has crept steadily into HR and leadership literature, defined as the will toward good, expressed through empathy, tolerance, and support. Recent French research (Benraïss-Noailles & Cusin, University of Bordeaux) draws a distinction worth keeping: benevolent management is formalized (remote work policies, bonuses, training programs, a benevolence you can point to in a handbook). Benevolent leadership is informal: it adapts, case by case, to what a specific person actually needs, and it doesn’t require a managerial title to exist.
It also connects to the broader “care” literature imported from healthcare into organizational thinking: recognizing the vulnerability and interdependence of colleagues regardless of rank, treating trust as the glue of a working team, making space for emotion rather than excluding it. The documented risk: managers who try to run major organizational change through a purely benevolent posture report real difficulty. Benevolence doesn’t always survive contact with a hard, forced transformation, particularly when the two forms (managerial and leadership-based) get confused with each other.
6. Recognition-based leadership
The oldest philosophical root of the six, tracing back to 19th-century ideas about how a person becomes a “subject” only through being recognized as one. German philosopher Axel Honneth mapped recognition across three spheres: intimate/private (recognition through love, which builds self-confidence), legal-political (recognition through rights and inclusion, which builds self-respect), and social (recognition through one’s contribution, largely through work, which builds self-esteem).
Applied to organizations, Quebec researcher Jean-Pierre Brun breaks recognition into four levers: recognizing the person (independent of their output, the ethical dimension: the right to be heard, to weigh in), recognizing results (the objective, measurable version), recognizing engagement (effort, initiative, the subjective version), and recognizing practice (skill and craft). Recognition can come from above, from peers, or from outside the organization entirely (clients, users), and its absence is one of the most consistently cited drivers of psychosocial risk at work.
What the research keeps returning to: the standards for what counts as adequate recognition aren’t fixed. They shift with social norms, which means the struggle for recognition inside an organization is itself a live indicator of where the tension actually sits, not something to resolve once and file away.
None of this is a menu, it’s a set of dilemmas
The study’s conclusion resists tidying the six models into a ranked list, and instead ties each one to a live managerial tension it helps an organization navigate:
- Distributed leadership speaks to the tension between participative strategy and assertive direction. It offers a middle path, but only under demanding conditions (clear roles, institutional trust, real regulation), without which it dilutes authority instead of sharing it.
- Transformational leadership speaks to the tension between individual sense-making and collective efficiency. Strong for restoring coherence during structural reorganization, but risks becoming empty rhetoric without real spaces for reflection and dialogue.
- Adaptive leadership speaks to the tension between maintaining stability and pursuing transformative innovation, equipping people to tell the difference between a problem with a known fix and one that requires inventing something new.
- Authoritarian leadership speaks to the tension between assumed authority and acknowledged vulnerability. Its legitimate use is narrow: emergencies where execution has to outrun deliberation.
- Benevolent and recognition-based leadership speak to the tension between caring for people and caring for the work itself, necessary as expectations of meaning and respect rise, but risky when not backed by explicit, fair criteria.
Leadership, in the end, isn’t a trait one person either has or lacks. It’s a more diffuse, less fixed function, built inside interactions and specific contexts rather than handed down with a title. The organizations that navigate change well aren’t the ones that picked the “right” model and stuck with it. They’re the ones that can name which of these tensions they’re actually sitting in, and reach for the register built for it.
Source: “Leadership : 6 modèles qui montrent que rien n’est figé,” Direction de la Prospective et du Dialogue Public, Métropole de Lyon, January 2026.
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