Selecting Self-and-Follower Goal-Aware Leadership Styles Across Sectors: A Decision Support Approach

The landscape of effective leadership is undergoing a critical re-evaluation, with new research highlighting a significant gap in current leadership theories. A recent study proposes a novel framework, the Self-and-Follower Goal-Aware Leadership (SFGAL) model, to address the limitations of existing approaches, which often overemphasize follower-centric perspectives while neglecting the crucial role of leaders’ self-awareness regarding their own goals. This research aims to identify the most appropriate SFGAL-based leadership styles for distinct sectors—energy, automotive, healthcare, and information and communication technologies—and to illuminate sector-specific differences in leadership effectiveness.

The study reveals that current leadership research frequently falls short of addressing multidimensional performance criteria comprehensively. These criteria include employee engagement, team productivity, innovation, job security, and sustainability. Instead, much of the existing literature predominantly focuses on follower-focused approaches, failing to systematically assess leaders’ own goal awareness. This imbalance necessitates the development of holistic, data-driven decision-making models for selecting leadership styles across various sectors, a domain where studies remain notably limited.

Addressing the Leadership Deficit: The SFGAL Model

The research identifies four leadership alternatives within the SFGAL model: win-win (high self and follower focus), self-oriented (high self and low follower focus), self-neglecting/over-giving (low self and high follower focus), and lose-lose (low self and low follower focus). The study employs a sophisticated methodology, integrating machine learning for expert weighting, the Criteria Importance Through Intercriteria Correlation (CIMAS) method for calculating criterion weights, and the Combined Compromise Solution (CoCoSo) technique for ranking leadership alternatives. Uncertainty and linguistic evaluations are handled using the innovative Koch Snowflake fuzzy set approach, enhancing the reliability and validity of the decision process through a demographic and attribute-based approach to expert weighting.

Key Findings: Sector-Specific Leadership Priorities

The study’s key contributions lie in developing a sector-sensitive decision-making framework that generates unique leadership strategies for different industries, strengthening uncertainty modeling with the Koch Snowflake fuzzy set application, and increasing decision process reliability through expert weighting.

Crucially, the findings indicate that innovation emerges as the most important criterion in the automotive and information technology sectors. In contrast, occupational safety is paramount in the energy sector, while employee engagement takes precedence in the healthcare sector. Across all sectors, a win-win leadership style is identified as the most suitable option. Self-oriented leadership is recognized as the second priority in the energy, healthcare, and information technology sectors.

The Global Engagement Crisis and the Need for Balanced Leadership

The urgency for such research is underscored by alarming global statistics: only 27% of employees worldwide are engaged in their work, 29% trust their leaders, and a mere 21% feel supported in their professional growth, according to recent reports from DDI and Gallup. These figures point to a significant engagement crisis and a deficit in transformational and authentic leadership. This situation necessitates a re-examination of existing leadership theories and their practical applications.

While traditional leadership theories like transformational, authentic, and servant leadership have emphasized the leader’s role in fostering follower needs, motivation, and development, they often implicitly frame self-focused leader behaviors as detrimental. This creates a void in understanding how leaders can effectively balance their personal professional objectives with their responsibilities to their teams, particularly in complex and demanding organizational environments. The SFGAL model aims to bridge this gap by explicitly acknowledging and integrating leaders’ self-goal awareness alongside their awareness of followers’ goals.

Methodology: A Data-Driven Approach to Leadership Assessment

The study’s methodological rigor is a cornerstone of its findings. Ten senior professionals with extensive experience in human resources management, organizational leadership, and strategic decision-making served as experts. Their demographic and professional characteristics, including age, years of experience, and number of certifications or patents, were used to derive expertise scores via machine learning-based dimensionality reduction. This approach moves beyond uniformly weighting all experts, acknowledging that experience and contributions can vary significantly.

The criteria evaluated were employee commitment (ECMMT), team productivity (TMPDV), innovation (INVTN), job security (JBSCR), and sustainability (SSTNBY). These were assessed using linguistic terms, which were then transformed into fuzzy numbers to account for inherent uncertainties. The CIMAS method was employed to determine the relative importance of these criteria within each sector. Subsequently, the CoCoSo technique, integrated with Koch Snowflake fuzzy sets, was used to rank the four SFGAL leadership styles: win-win, self-oriented, self-neglecting/over-giving, and lose-lose.

Sector-Specific Analysis: Unpacking the Nuances

• Energy Sector: Job security and sustainability emerged as the most critical criteria, highlighting the sector’s focus on safety and long-term viability. The win-win leadership style was ranked highest, followed by self-oriented leadership. This suggests that a balanced approach that prioritizes both organizational stability and forward-looking strategic goals is essential.
• Automotive Sector: Innovation and team productivity were identified as the most important criteria. The analysis favored win-win leadership, with self-oriented leadership as the second choice. This indicates that a dual focus on fostering creativity and ensuring efficient output, coupled with a strong leader vision, is crucial for driving advancements in areas like electric and autonomous vehicle development.
• Healthcare Sector: Employee commitment and job security were deemed paramount. The win-win leadership style ranked first, surprisingly followed by self-neglecting/over-giving leadership. This suggests that while a balanced approach is ideal, the high-pressure, patient-centric environment of healthcare may sometimes necessitate leaders who prioritize their team’s needs above their own, particularly during critical situations.
• Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) Sector: Innovation and employee commitment were the most significant criteria. Similar to the automotive sector, the win-win leadership style was ranked highest, followed by self-oriented leadership. This underscores the need for leadership that fosters creativity and engagement to drive technological advancements and maintain a competitive edge in this rapidly evolving field.

Implications and Future Directions

The study’s findings have significant implications for leadership development and organizational strategy. By providing sector-specific insights, the SFGAL framework can guide organizations in selecting and cultivating leadership styles that best align with their unique operational demands and performance priorities. For instance, companies in the energy sector might focus on developing leaders who excel in ensuring safety and long-term sustainability, while technology firms might prioritize leaders adept at fostering innovation and employee engagement.

The robustness of the findings was further validated through sensitivity and comparative analyses using various ranking models, confirming the reliability of the proposed methodology. The consistent ranking across different scenarios and models strengthens the confidence in the identified leadership priorities for each sector.

While the study provides valuable insights, future research could expand the framework to include a wider array of sectors and evaluation criteria, such as financial performance and digital transformation capabilities. Incorporating empirical data alongside expert judgments would further enhance the generalizability and predictive power of the SFGAL model.

In conclusion, this research offers a critical advancement in leadership studies by advocating for a more balanced approach that integrates leaders’ self-goal awareness with their attentiveness to followers’ needs. The SFGAL model and its sector-specific application provide a powerful tool for navigating the complexities of modern leadership and fostering more effective, engaged, and productive workplaces across diverse industries.