How the test works
You answer four working situations. Each answer moves points across the five styles rather than dropping you into a single box, and the result shows the whole spread. Sources are named on every page.
Two frameworks, not one
The five styles are not siblings. Autocratic, democratic, and laissez-faire form Lewin, Lippitt, and White’s 1939 experimental trio of group climates. Transformational and transactional come from the Burns (1978) and Bass (1985) line, which describes influence processes rather than decision procedures. A test that treats all five as interchangeable flavours misreads both literatures; this one keeps the seam visible.
Why a spread, not a verdict
Because the scholarship itself refuses the single box. Bass argued that transformational and transactional leaders can each be directive or participative. Burns treated transforming and transactional leadership as opposite ends of one continuum; Bass treated them as separate dimensions the same leader can display. Even laissez-faire is disputed — one of three styles in Lewin’s trio, the absence of leadership in Bass’s Full Range model. Where the sources disagree, the style pages say so.
A note on attribution
The classic trio is popularly credited to Lewin alone, but the 1939 experiments and their publication were joint work with Lippitt and White. All three are named here throughout.