Volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity call for different ways of perceiving the world, different approaches to sense and decision making, and different modes and combinations of leadership.
- Administrative Leadership. Administrative leadership is the managerial approach followed by individuals and groups in formal roles as they plan and coordinate activities in standardized business processes to accomplish organizationally-prescribed outcomes efficiently and effectively.
- Adaptive Leadership. Adaptive leadership is the informal process that emerges as organizations generate and advance ideas to solve problems and create opportunity; unlike administrative leadership, it is not an act of authority and takes place in informal emergent dynamic among interactive agents.
- Enabling Leadership. Enabling leadership is the sum of actions to facilitate the flow of creativity (e.g., adaptability, innovation, and learning) from adaptive structures into administrative structures; like adaptive leadership, it can take place at all levels of an organization but its nature will vary by hierarchical level and position. (Uhl-Bien, Marion, & McKelvey, 2007)
You may want to check the following book out:
Political leadership in the age of interactive governance: Reflections on the political aspects of metagovernance
E Sørensen, J Torfing - Critical reflections on interactive …, 2016 - books.google.com
Not sure whether these prototypical modes of leadership have not been mixed throughout the day as you may show admin leadership wrt doing admin work, later you have to promote a new org dvlp and finally you may mentor a new team member with accommodating with the org culture. While this is true on the individual level it may also hold for whole organizations which often are not just in one context or mode.
Regarding situative leadership the seminal book by Yukl may be a good starter - in case you do not know it already. You may profit from having a look into the leadership in extreme contexts literature (a special issue some years ago in TLQ and you may find more recent contributions by using google scholar or others)
Seems that corporate culture must also be considered in order to answer the question. Culture can have a synergistic or countervailing effect on the effectiveness of a given style of leadership.
One way culture could have an effect is by how change or threat is perceived by the organization. Is it seen as an opportunity? Does it trigger post traumatic flashbacks of past events ? Does it open or close the organizational dialog and operations?
I suppose I've added more questions rather than answered yours. But thank you for the provocative question.
Unamuno reportedly said : The truth is not merely the lawful, but rather that which provokes the mind and causes growth.