Leadership as Coordination Control: Behavioral Signatures and the Recovery-Advantage Boundary in Multi-Agent LLM Teams

Leadership styles as coordination controllers in multi-agent LLM teams: contingency theory validated

A new arXiv paper operationalizes three classical leadership styles (transactional, transformational, situational) as explicit action-set controllers over multi-agent LLM teams, testing when process-level coordination adds value versus plain majority voting. Across four task regimes and three open-weight model families, no controller dominates on accuracy — consistent with contingency theory — with gains appearing only when the round-0 majority is unreliable, the task is recoverable, and undirected interaction fails to self-repair. The authors formalize a 'recovery-advantage boundary' mapping onto classical constructs like leadership substitutes and path-goal redundancy. The largely null accuracy result is framed as theory confirmation rather than a failure of the controllers.