"7 Transformations of Leadership"

List of 7 categories of leadership proposed by Rooke & Torbert

R&T's ideas about leadership are popular. Their 7 categories are listed in the Box. Download their paper hereLink to external website: and you can check THEE's thinking for yourself.

Reference: Closed David Rooke and William R Torbert ("R&T"). Seven Transformations of Leadership. Harvard Business Review, 2005.

ClosedSource of R&T's Ideas 

R&T used data from a 36 sentence-completion survey given to a very large number of executives over a 25 year period. Example prompt:  "A good leader …………".  Researcher preconceptions and perspectives will have affected choice of prompts, and interpretation of the free-form replies. It is not clear who the highly trained evaluators were, nor what training they received.

ClosedWhat is Leadership?

«Leader» refers to a person who can and does organize and influence a group of people, usually called «followers» or «the led», to achieve a result desired or accepted by the leader and desired or accepted by the group. «Leadership» refers to that process.

ClosedWhere is «Leadership» located in THEE?

THEE is a taxonomy mapping how individuals function in a social context. Leadership is about an individual affecting a group and the social context. So phenomena relevant to leadership should be widely distributed in its structures—and that is the case.

Taking the Challenge

THEE will play by extracting R&T's verbatim descriptions of leader categories, and then searching for correspondences with descriptions of categories in THEE.

To help follow the 2 sets of ideas—R&T's & THEE's—orange text indicates a direct quote from R&T's HBR article; and text in blue indicates THEE names and phrases.

Last Updated: 12-Jan-2012