Summary
Leadership is often described through broad labels such as transformational, ethical, authentic, or servant leadership. While these concepts can offer useful shorthand for how leadership is experienced, they provide limited guidance for practice because they say relatively little about the specific actions that produce those experiences.
New research by Thomas Fischer, George C. Banks, and Leah Bourque argues that leadership research has developed along two distinct paths: one focused on how behavior is interpreted and another on what leaders concretely do. Each captures something the other misses. By integrating the two, the researchers offer a more actionable understanding of leadership that connects observable behavior with the context-dependent meaning others attach to it. For organizations, this shift has important implications for how leaders are developed, given feedback, and selected.
Leadership Is Easier to Name Than to Practice
Leaders are regularly encouraged to be empowering, authentic, ethical, supportive, or transformational. These descriptions provide useful aspirations. The challenge comes when a leader asks a more practical question: What should I actually do?
Consider a manager who notices an employee struggling with a task and suggests a different way to approach it. The manager may intend to be helpful. One employee could experience the intervention as useful coaching. Another might see the same behavior as unnecessary interference or micromanagement. The act itself has not changed, but its meaning has.
This distinction matters because leadership ultimately unfolds through actions: the decisions leaders make, the words they use, when they speak, how they respond to others, where they direct their attention, and even when they decide not to act. Yet much of what leaders hear about effective leadership describes how those behaviors should ultimately be understood rather than the behaviors themselves.
That can create a gap between knowing the kind of leader someone wants to be and knowing how to behave in ways that others will experience that way.
Getting Closer to What Leaders Actually Do
Fischer, Banks, and Bourque examined 222 reviews of leadership behavior research to understand how the field has approached this challenge. They identify two distinct schools of thought.
The dominant approach, which the researchers call the classical behavioral school, organizes leadership according to the function or meaning attributed to behavior. Leadership might be understood as task-oriented, relationship-oriented, change-oriented, or moral. Familiar concepts such as transformational, ethical, authentic, and servant leadership largely follow this logic.
This approach has an important strength. Concepts such as supportive or ethical leadership can carry meaning across many different settings. But there is also a limitation: describing a leader as supportive does not necessarily reveal what the leader actually did to be experienced as supportive.
A newer body of research takes a different approach. Rather than beginning with a leadership category, it examines the observable components of behavior. The researchers identify five broad forms: the choices leaders make, their embodied behavior such as gaze or tone, their interactions with others, the language they use, and the timing and sequencing of their actions.
This approach can identify whether someone interrupted another person, asked an open question, changed the timing of a decision, used particular language, or directed attention toward certain people. Those behaviors can be observed and, importantly for leaders, practiced.
But behavioral specificity brings its own limitation. An action does not carry a universal meaning. Extended eye contact, for example, might communicate attentiveness in one setting and feel intrusive in another. The same leadership behavior can be understood differently depending on the situation, the people involved, their prior relationship, and what has happened before.
New Findings with Implications for Leadership Practice
The researchers’ central insight is that leadership is better understood when these two perspectives are connected rather than treated separately.
Observable behavior and the meaning attached to it are related, but they are not the same thing. Leaders do something first. Others encounter that behavior within a particular context and form judgments about what it means.
That distinction helps explain why broad leadership labels can sometimes be difficult to translate into practice. Two leaders could both be described as empowering while behaving in very different ways. Conversely, the same concrete behavior could serve several purposes at once. A manager suggesting a new work process might simultaneously be solving a task problem, supporting an employee, and encouraging change.
Context further complicates the relationship. A behavior that works with one person or in one situation may produce a different response elsewhere. Previous interactions between leader and follower can change how a new behavior is interpreted. A shift in circumstances can also change what people need from a leader and how they understand the leader’s actions.
Leadership behavior is therefore not simply a stable style that a person displays consistently. It unfolds through episodes in which leaders act, others interpret those actions, circumstances change, and leaders adjust.
The implication is significant: effective leadership cannot be reduced either to adopting the right leadership label or to mastering a fixed list of behaviors. Leaders need both a repertoire of concrete actions and an ability to understand how those actions are likely to be experienced in context.
What This Means for Leaders
For leadership development, the research suggests an important change in how feedback is delivered.
Instead of moving immediately to judgments such as “you were not inclusive enough” or “you need to be more empowering,” development can begin by separating observation from evaluation. What did the leader actually say or do? Who spoke and who did not? When did the leader intervene? Did the leader ask a question, provide an answer, interrupt, remain silent, or redirect the conversation?
Only then does the second question become useful: How were those actions experienced, and did they create the intended effect?
Fischer and colleagues argue that this two-stage process can make leadership more learnable. Leaders can practice observable behaviors in meetings, coaching conversations, or simulations and receive feedback on behaviors such as speaking patterns, interruptions, word choice, timing, or nonverbal signals. They can then examine how those behaviors were interpreted by others and adjust accordingly.
The difference is subtle but important. Telling someone to “be more empowering” offers a desired destination. Showing the leader which behaviors contributed to others feeling empowered, and under what conditions, provides a path for getting there.
The research also raises questions for leadership selection. Organizations frequently evaluate candidates using broad judgments about qualities such as authenticity, charisma, or servant leadership. Those judgments can be influenced by halo effects and assumptions about what a leader is supposed to look or sound like. Anchoring evaluation more firmly in observable behaviors can help organizations ask a more concrete question: What did this person actually do that demonstrates the leadership required in this role?
Behavioral criteria do not eliminate judgment. They give judgment a clearer foundation.
From Leadership Labels to Leadership Practice
Leadership concepts remain valuable because they give people language for describing what effective leadership is meant to accomplish and how it is experienced. But the research from Fischer and colleagues suggests that those concepts become more useful when organizations can connect them to observable behavior.
For leaders, this means becoming more attentive not only to intentions but also to actions. What did you actually do? How did others experience it? What about the situation, relationship, or timing may have shaped that interpretation? What might you do differently the next time?
For organizations, the opportunity is to make leadership development more behavioral, feedback more specific, and selection more closely tied to what leaders will actually be expected to do.
The goal is not to find a universal set of leadership behaviors. The research points toward something more practical: helping leaders understand the connection between the actions they take, the context in which they take them, and the meaning those actions ultimately acquire for others.
Access the full research paper here: Fischer, T., Banks, G. C., & Bourque, L. (2026). Leadership behaviors: A synthesis of schools of thought. Journal of Management, 52(6), 2551–2583. https://doi.org/10.1177/01492063261415816
