Leadership style orientations of senior executives in Australia: senior executive leadership profiles: an analysis of 54 Australian top managers

Research into the personality trait antecedents of executive leadership styles demonstrates the links between dispositional anchors and the following leadership orientations; autocratic, democratic, visionary-inspirational and laissez-faire. Australian senior executives in this study are shown to have a strong achievement-orientation, a tendency toward visionary-inspirational leadership, and a range of tendencies toward autocratic and democratic leader behaviours. This profile emerged out of a study in which 54 senior executives participated, and provides an update on previous senior executive leadership studies conducted on representative samples of top-level Australian managers (eg; Wood and Vilkinas, 2005; Hunt, 2006; Brown and Sarma, 2007).