Where Do You Sit on the Tannenbaum and Schmidt Continuum?
Let’s take a fresh look at leadership styles and decision-making with a focus on Tannenbaum and Schmidt.
The Tannenbaum and Schmidt Continuum theory and the model used to present it visually, make it easier to understand the different leadership styles and when to use them.
There’s a wealth of information out there about leadership styles, and it can be hard to cut through it. Tannenbaum & Schmidt’s Continuum and the model keep it simple, presenting ‘top-down’ authoritative management at one end, and collaborative, team-based working at the other.
What is the Tannenbaum and Schmidt Continuum Theory?
The Tannenbaum and Schmidt Continuum theory highlights the relationship between freedom and authority at work. It connects the different levels of freedom a manager chooses to give employees – “Giving autonomy” – with the level of authority they exert when managing staff – “Taking control.”
Tannenbaum and Schmidt’s article, How to Choose a Leadership Pattern, was published in the Harvard Business Review in 1958 and reprinted and updated in 1973. The updated version is available on the Harvard Business Review’s website.
As originally published, Tannenbaum and Schmidt’s Continuum theory identified seven leadership styles, or components, based on the use of boss-centred leadership versus employee-centred leadership.
Seeing Tannenbaum and Schmidt’s continuum as “Manager versus employees” is potentially divisive.
Put more positively, you can also read it as a continuum of team autonomy, from individual role-based work set by managers to collaborative approaches.
In all this, it’s important to remember that delegating freedom and decision-making ability doesn’t stop the manager from being held accountable. The leadership style you choose must not only get the best from your people but also produce the results you want.
What Did Tannenbaum and Schmidt Invent?
In their original article, Tannenbaum and Schmidt invented a model presenting visually the choices leaders have in how they reach decisions. A visual of the model is below.
As you move from left to right on this diagram, the leader hands over their power to make decisions on their own and increases group involvement.
Leadership Style
The leader needs to have the self-awareness to judge the situation and the ability and preparedness of their team, to choose how much to hand over control.
But like with delegative leadership, they can always step in and go back to manager-oriented leadership until they feel they can relax their grip safely.
Tannenbaum and Schmidt saw these leadership styles as stages on their continuum.
The 7 Stages of the Tannenbaum Schmidt Leadership Continuum:
1. Telling
The leader tells people what to do. You’re telling people to do something you’ve made your mind up about, and you don’t want any argument.
Telling is fine for a business in the short term if the boss is always making good decisions. But as a regular strategy, it’s not usually popular with employees who like the freedom to use their own judgement.
2. Selling
This stage, Selling, is also ‘top-down,’ like telling. The difference is, it needs the leader to sell their idea to their people, or their top managers. It involves persuasion, self-awareness active listening and emotional intelligence.
By explaining the thinking behind the proposal, the leader aims to persuade other people that their ideas are valid, evidence-based, and make sense. This may be particularly necessary when talking about a change of direction or taking the company into new areas.
After the leadership team has agreed, the next layer down in the hierarchy needs to sell the ‘top down’ decision to their team members. This is necessary to engage everyone and get buy-in, so everyone ‘owns’ the decision.
3. Suggesting
Here the leader gives their employees a range of options and allows consensus to form around the best option. This reduces the leader’s ability to make the final decision but gives the team more choices.
Such an approach can work well in a creative business or in communications, NPD, or marketing.
Working by suggesting also calls for strong powers of persuasion. Leaders need to defend the shortlisted ideas from people arguing in favour of other ideas which are irrelevant.
Talking to leadership, it might be sensible to offer a selection of ideas and spell out their respective merits, rather than just one, as it shows respect and flexibility.
Inviting suggestions from trusted employees is also a good move. Even if their ideas are unhelpful or impractical, welcoming their suggestions build engagement and loyalty. People are more likely to speak favourably about the company when asked about their employee experience.
4. Consulting
This is a very common form of leadership. It’s in the middle of the continuum. This involves the leader having a team of people they trust and can draw on for advice and ideas.
Unlike Suggesting, Consulting doesn’t just happen occasionally, it’s more a standard practice. Businesses where consulting is deep set make fewer ‘top down’ decisions.
Consulting is also a good way for leaders to resist their biases and welcome new ideas.
5. Joining
Here the leader joins a decision-making group and oversees the process while trying not to dominate it completely. This takes some balancing.
It’s important for the leader to be clear about the role, limits, and degree of authority they will exert. This should happen early in the conversation. It’s how coaches and mentors work.
In the process you are also developing your people’s powers of leadership, so be supportive.
6. Delegating
When leaders have confidence in their teams, they may start to delegate more responsibility for decision-making. But at the same time, the leaders are still liable for their decision to delegate, and hence for what their subordinates decide.
It’s important for leaders to praise their people’s decisions and not just motivate them because it reflects well on their leadership.
7. Abdicating
This last stage sounds drastic.
The thought of leaders leaving employees to run the business sounds like a recipe for disaster. But in this context ‘abdicating’ also happens for instance when the founder sells the company, leading to the birth of what’s effectively a new business.
At the same time, stage 7 on the continuum is also where you would expect to find the head of a product innovation team leading an experienced and capable group. The boss hasn’t disappeared altogether, they’re still in the background. if the team stops delivering, they step in and do some necessary ‘telling.’
Tannenbaum & Schmidt’s Theory Isn’t Just for Leadership Teams, It’s for Team Managers Too
As a manager, you can also use Tannenbaum & Schmidt’s theory to decide the best options for leading your team in everyday work.
Here are some ways you can do that:
- Make the decision and announce it.
- Sell the decision to the team.
- Put forward ideas and invite questions.
- Presents tentative decision, subject to change.
- State the problem, get suggestions and make a decision.
- Defines limits and asks the group to make decisions.
- Permit your team to function within the limits you define.
Who Were Tannenbaum and Schmidt, and How Do They Fit in with Kurt Lewin’s Work?
Robert K. Tannenbaum was a Professor at the UCLA Anderson School of Management and an organisational psychologist. His writing partner was Warren H. Schmidt, a Doctor of Psychology.
The pair first developed their continuum model of leadership in a paper published in the Harvard Business Review in 1958, 20 years after the German American psychologist Dr Kurt Lewin Identified his leadership styles.
How Is Tannenbaum and Schmidt’s Theory Different to Lewin’s?
Dr Kurt Lewin identified three leadership styles, still widely recognised today. Here’s a brief overview of each:
- Authoritative or Autocratic leadership is the most boss-centred, with firm deadlines and clear expectations imposed by the boss.
- Democratic leadership is less boss-centred, encouraging the free exchange of ideas among the team and relying on every member contributing.
- Laissez-faire is Lewin’s most employee-centred style. Managers assign work and general direction but aren’t involved day-to-day. Employees are left to decide the best way to fulfil their responsibilities.
Lewin’s three leadership styles were clearly distinct from each other.
Tannenbaum and Schmidt suggested that leadership behaviour was more of a continuum, from top-down, dictatorial, boss-centred to team-based, employee-centred.
Why Is Tannenbaum and Schmidt’s Thinking so Different to Lewin’s?
Tannenbaum and Schmidt and Lewin were all psychologists. But Lewin was writing at a time when psychiatrists were seen as experts who knew how to resolve patients’ problems.
Things changed in 1951 when Carl Rogers, a founder of humanistic psychology, came up with the idea of client-based therapy. This assumes psychiatrists can diagnose, but after that, the client is best able to decide what to explore, and how.
Since then, mental conditions and behaviour disorders have been increasingly seen as on a continuum, with therapy enabling clients to move to a safer place. It’s likely this continuum approach influenced Tannenbaum and Schmidt’s thinking.
Where Do Mcgregor’s Theory X and Theory Y Come In?
The social psychologist Douglas McGregor was also working in the 50s and 60s and was a further influence on Tannenbaum and Schmidt. McGregor came up with two contrasting motivation models.
Theory X assumes people dislike work. They want to avoid it and take responsibility unwillingly.
Theory Y considers that people are self-motivated and happily take responsibility.
Leaders who favour Theory Y are more likely to give their subordinates a chance when it comes to decision-making. But if the team members let them down, they should expect the boss to revert to Theory X and be authoritative, taking back control.
Choosing Your Option
Just like the more traditional leadership styles, the options leaders choose in the Tannenbaum & Schmidt continuum will depend on the situation.
A situation calling for a decision can be analysed as a combination of these two things:
- Group capability to handle it – skills, experience, workload.
- The nature of the task needing the decision – complexity, difficulty, risk, value, timescale, and relevance to the group’s capability.
As well as these situational pressures, Tannenbaum and Schmidt also identified two further sets of pressures that influence a leader’s natural choice of decision-making approach. These pressures are:
The leader’s Inner Pressures:
Leaders will have preferences about decision-making, based on their beliefs and behaviours. They will also consider their confidence in their own and the team’s experience, the decision’s importance and the risk it involves for them personally.
Pressures from Subordinates:
An important factor here is colleagues’ willingness and ability to accept orders. They may want a say in the decision. Depending on their experience and the leader’s trust in them, they may be able to take responsibility for the outcome and reach the decision together.
Pros and Cons
Let’s weigh up the pros and cons of Tannenbaum and Schmidt’s leadership continuum.
Advantages of the Leadership Continuum:
- Gives managers a range of choices for involvement.
- Presents criteria for involvement and delegation.
- Focuses the decisionmaker on the relevant criteria, such as available resources and time.
- Emphasises employee development and empowerment.
- Encourages people to see how effective delegation might be under the model.
Disadvantages of the Leadership Continuum:
- Only involves the initial step of assigning a task, not the steps afterwards to determine the effectiveness of the outcome.
- Presupposes the manager has enough information to decide whether to keep the decision-making to themselves or pass it to the team.
- Assumes a “neutral” environment without social bonds or politics.
- Simplifies complex decisions.
Further Problems with the Leadership Continuum:
Employees’ view on leadership:
Critics have said the model doesn’t discuss how the employees view the different leadership stages. The last two, delegating and abdicating, can be seen as laissez-faire leadership, which isn’t always desirable.
Cultural differences:
From the employee’s perspective, cultural differences between employees from different backgrounds or countries and their perceptions of leadership aren’t considered in the model.
Personality types:
The model assumes the leader or manager is able to switch easily between the 7 different stages. It doesn’t take into account people’s personality types, as assessed by the Myers Briggs Type Indicator.
ESTJs are more likely to want to keep control. And if there’s no pressure to deliver, INFJs will feel comfortable giving day-to-day control over to people they can trust.
Is It Safe to Hand over This Decision to the Team?
You can put the Tannenbaum and Schmidt Continuum to work in understanding how you’re likely to behave regarding delegating decision-making:
Forces in you:
- Values – what you believe and feel.
- Confidence in your team.
- Leadership inclinations.
- Feelings of security in an uncertain situation.
Forces in your team:
- Readiness to assume responsibility in decision-making.
- Degree of tolerance for ambiguity.
- Interest in the problem and views about its importance.
- Strength of their need for autonomy.
- Knowledge and experience to deal with the problem.
- Understanding and identification with the goals of your business.
And Finally: It’s Not as Simple as They First Thought…
When Tannenbaum and Schmidt updated their work in 1973, they suggested a new continuum of patterns of leadership behaviour.
In this, the area of freedom between managers and non-managers is constantly redefined by interactions between them and external forces. The pattern was more complex compared to the previous one they identified.
Tannenbaum and Schmidt concluded that successful leaders know which behaviour is the most appropriate at a particular time. They shape their behaviour after a careful analysis of themselves, their subordinates, their business, and the environmental factors.
From reading this article, it may seem as if the ideal is a position between Tannenbaum and Schmidt’s two extremes. But the truth is, the nature of decision-making a leader displays probably swings constantly between them.
The continuum theory recognises that a leader’s style can be highly variable. Outside events like family rows, relationship problems or bad traffic on the way to work, can lead to the “displacement activity of the leader taking a more aggressive stance than usual and wanting control.
Understanding this is all the more reason to use Tannenbaum and Schmidt’s Continuum to help you take a balanced view of your decision-making. We at Making Business Matter know how hard decision-making can be. That’s why we also offer a leadership skills training course to add even greater value to you. Keep growing!
For even more useful content on leadership, check out our ultimate guide on Leadership Skills.
