LEAD 6133 Module 1 Comparison of Leadership Models Example

Three Models for Five Team Leads: Comparing Situational, Path-Goal and Shared Leadership at a Rural Delta Health Center Before Choosing How to Coach

Student Name

American College of Education

LEAD6133: Models of Leadership and Coaching

Module 1 Assignment

Instructor Name

October 12, 2026

Introduction

I am director of clinical operations at a composite federally qualified health center serving four counties in the Mississippi Delta. Five team leads report to me: the leads for front desk and scheduling, medical assistants, care coordination, behavioral health integration and the mobile clinic. All five were promoted from within, none had leadership training before taking the role and turnover on two of their teams exceeded 40% last year. This course asks how leadership and coaching fit together, and before I decide how to coach my leads I need to decide what kind of leadership I am coaching them toward. This paper compares three leadership models on their evidence and on what each implies for coaching.

What the Leads Say They Need

Before reading the research, I asked each lead one question in our regular one-on-one meetings: what part of leading your team is hardest? Their answers set the terms of the comparison. The front desk lead said she spends her days training people who leave within six months and has no time to plan. The care coordination lead said her team does good work that disappears into the hospital's referral system, so her coordinators feel their effort is wasted. The behavioral health lead said she supervises therapists who know their clinical work far better than she does and she is unsure what her role is. The medical assistant lead said she still does patient intake herself on busy days because it is faster than delegating. The mobile clinic lead said his team works so independently in the field that he only hears about problems after they have grown.

Each answer points to a different kind of leadership problem: structure for a constantly new team, obstacles outside the team's control, authority over experts, reluctance to delegate and distance from the work. No single model addresses all five, which is why the comparison that follows asks what each model is good for rather than which one is best.

Model 1: Situational Leadership

Situational leadership tells a leader to read how ready each person is for a given task and to dial instructions and encouragement up or down accordingly: firm guidance for the newcomer, a long leash for the seasoned and willing. It is the model most of my leads have heard of, usually through a half-day workshop. The evidence is weaker than its popularity. Thompson and Vecchio (2009) put three versions of the theory to the test with matched employees and supervisors; the original prescriptions mostly failed, though the data did offer modest backing for the simpler idea that newer employees benefit from more structure. For coaching, the model's main contribution is that simple idea: a lead with a new medical assistant should give clear direction, while a lead with a ten-year veteran should step back.

Model 2: Reformulated Path-Goal Theory

House (1996) reformulated path-goal theory around a simple premise: leaders help followers by supplying what their environment and abilities lack, clarifying paths to goals, removing obstacles and providing support, so that followers are motivated and able to perform. The theory names several classes of leader behavior, among them clarifying goals and paths, supporting followers, facilitating work and representing the team to others, and it predicts which are useful depending on the task and the people doing it. Its strength for my setting is its focus on obstacles. My care coordination lead's team does not lack motivation; it lacks a working referral system with the regional hospital, and a path-goal leader would spend her energy fixing that rather than giving speeches. For coaching, the model suggests asking each lead, in each case, what is in the way of the team and what the team cannot supply for itself.

Model 3: Shared Leadership

Shared leadership treats leadership as something distributed among team members rather than held by one person. Wang et al. (2014) meta-analyzed 42 independent samples and found an overall positive relationship between shared leadership and team effectiveness, with a corrected correlation of .34. They also found that what was shared mattered: sharing traditional behaviors such as structuring and consideration showed a weaker relationship than sharing newer forms such as transformational leadership or leadership as a whole. For a small health center where a medical assistant may know more about a patient's family than any lead, the finding is relevant. For coaching, the model shifts the goal from making each lead a better solo leader to helping each lead draw leadership out of the team.

Comparing the Three

The three models differ in where they place leadership and in their evidence. Situational leadership places it in the lead's adjustments to each follower and has the weakest support, apart from its core idea about new employees. Path-goal theory places it in the lead's work on the team's environment and has a substantial theoretical tradition, though its full set of predictions is hard to test. Shared leadership places it across the team and has encouraging meta-analytic support. The models are not rivals so much as answers to different questions: how to treat each person, what to remove from the team's way and who besides the lead should lead.

What Each Means for My Five Leads

Applied to my leads, the comparison suggests a blend tuned to each team. The front desk lead manages a high-turnover team of new hires; the situational idea that new employees need clear structure fits her most urgent problem. The care coordination lead's team is stalled by a broken referral process; path-goal theory points her toward fixing that obstacle. The behavioral health integration lead works with licensed therapists who are more expert than she is in their field; shared leadership fits a team whose members should be leading parts of the work. The medical assistant and mobile clinic leads sit between these cases, and coaching will help each decide which emphasis their team needs. The medical assistant lead's habit of doing intake herself is a situational problem in reverse: her experienced staff need less direction than she gives them. The mobile clinic lead, far from his team most days, may gain most from shared leadership, with a senior nurse on each mobile route acting for him in the field.

Limits of the Comparison

Most of the evidence comes from corporate and military settings, not rural health centers, and none of it was gathered among leads promoted from within with no training, who may lack the confidence to share leadership or to confront obstacles above their level. The comparison also leaves out the community context: in a center where staff and patients are often neighbors and relatives, relationships carry obligations that no leadership model describes. These limits do not make the models useless, but they mean coaching must test them against what the leads actually experience.

Conclusion

Comparing three leadership models before choosing a coaching approach clarified what I want my leads to learn: to give new staff structure, to clear the obstacles their teams cannot clear themselves and to share leadership with team members who know more than they do. The next module will compare coaching models to decide how to help them learn it.

References

House, R. J. (1996). Path-goal theory of leadership: Lessons, legacy, and a reformulated theory. The Leadership Quarterly, 7(3), 323-352. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1048-9843(96)90024-7

Thompson, G., & Vecchio, R. P. (2009). Situational leadership theory: A test of three versions. The Leadership Quarterly, 20(5), 837-848. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2009.06.014

Wang, D., Waldman, D. A., & Zhang, Z. (2014). A meta-analysis of shared leadership and team effectiveness. Journal of Applied Psychology, 99(2), 181-198. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0034531