Leadership Behaviors: A Synthesis of Schools of Thought

Abstract

We identify a divide between two schools of thought in leadership behavior research. The classical behavioral school (CBS) categorizes leadership behaviors based on their latent functions and meanings—task, relations, change, and moral—with the aim of achieving intersubjective agreement among evaluators. In contrast, the neo-behavioral school (NBS) focuses on the observable forms and manifestations of behavior—choices, embodiment, interactions, textual markers, and temporal patterns—in the pursuit of objective description. In this article, we conduct a metasynthesis to systematically describe, evaluate, and integrate these two schools. We identify their distinct research logics, showing that CBS categories enable cross-contextual generalization but conflate behavioral description with evaluative judgment, thereby risking causal indeterminacy and limiting actionability. Conversely, NBS approaches enable causally well-determined analyses of what leaders concretely do but risk reductionism and limited generalizability of meaning when studied in isolation. Building on this analysis, we identify school-specific best practices and distinguish limitations that can be mitigated within each school from those that require cross-school integration. We then develop an integrative framework that assigns distinct causal roles to concrete behavioral manifestations and to evaluations of their function and meaning, explicating how leadership behaviors acquire meaning across contexts and how CBS evaluations emerge as downstream consequences of NBS-specified behavioral aspects and various contextual factors. Finally, we propose a generative research agenda that advances leadership behavior research across schools of thought. The framework also has practical implications, enabling behaviorally grounded leadership development through actionable feedback, as well as more equitable and evidence-based leadership selection anchored in observable behavior.