Types of Followership: The Three Models, and the Type Your Company Is Producing

By Andreas Pettersson, Founder, Leaders ADAPT

Most pages about the types of followership stop at Robert Kelley's grid. Sheep, yes-people, alienated, pragmatists, stars. Useful, forty years old, and only one of three published models that matter.

I care about this for a less academic reason. I ran a company that grew past 150 people, and I watched the same person move between those types in one quarter depending on how I behaved in a meeting. The type of follower you have is not a fixed trait they walk in with. It is mostly a reading of the leader.

This page gives you all three models side by side, attributed properly, and then the part the textbooks leave out: which type your company is producing right now, and what you are doing to cause it.

What are the five types of followership in Kelley's model?

A followership type is a category of follower behavior defined by how independently a person thinks and how actively they engage with the leader's goals. The definition separates a person's behavior in a specific room from their character. The models describe behavior. Behavior moves.

The Kelley followership model appeared in "In Praise of Followers" (Harvard Business Review, 1988) and was developed in The Power of Followership (1992).

1. Passive followers, the sheep. Low independent thinking, low engagement. They do what they are told and wait to be told again. They need external motivation and take no initiative.
2. Conformist followers, the yes-people. Low independent thinking, high engagement. Busy, loyal, willing, and they defend the leader's worst idea with the same energy as the best one.
3. Alienated followers. High independent thinking, low engagement. They see the problems clearly and share the analysis in the parking lot. Often a former star who got burned.
4. Pragmatist followers, the survivors. Average on both axes. They read the wind, avoid controversy, and back whichever position is winning.
5. Exemplary followers, the stars. High independent thinking, high engagement. They think for themselves, bring energy, and disagree in the room rather than after it.

What two dimensions does Kelley use to classify followers?

The first axis runs from dependent, uncritical thinking to independent, critical thinking: does the person evaluate what they are asked to do, or accept it? The second runs from passive to active engagement: do they wait, or do they move? The four corners are sheep, yes-people, alienated and exemplary, with the pragmatist in the middle.

What is courageous followership? Chaleff's four styles

Ira Chaleff's The Courageous Follower (1995, second edition 2003) starts from a different question: not how much a person thinks, but how much courage they bring, and in which direction.

A courageous follower is someone who supports the leader's purpose fully and challenges the leader's behavior or decisions when they threaten that purpose. Chaleff's two dimensions are the courage to support and the courage to challenge, and crossing them gives four styles.

• Implementer. High support, low challenge. Gets things done, rarely pushes back. Leaders love implementers and are hurt by them, because the implementer executes the bad decision as cleanly as the good one.
• Partner. High support, high challenge. Fully committed to the mission, and willing to tell the leader in the room that the plan is wrong. This is the style Chaleff wants.
• Individualist. Low support, high challenge. Says what they think, does not carry the weight afterward. Useful in a debate, exhausting in execution.
• Resource. Low support, low challenge. Does the minimum, stays out of the way.

Chaleff also names five courages the partner practices: the courage to assume responsibility, to serve, to challenge, to participate in transformation, and to take moral action. The last one includes leaving or blowing the whistle when the leader will not change.

What are Kellerman's five types of followers?

Barbara Kellerman's Followership (Harvard Business Press, 2008) drops thinking and courage as axes and sorts Kellerman followers by one variable: level of engagement, for or against the leader.

• Isolates. Completely detached. They do not know or care who leads, which strengthens whoever does.
• Bystanders. They watch, they know, they do nothing. A silent vote for the status quo.
• Participants. Engaged enough to act, in favor of the leader or against.
• Activists. Heavily invested and willing to work hard for the leader or to remove the leader.
• Diehards. All in. Ready to go down with the leader or to take the leader down.

Kellerman's model is the most honest about power. A highly engaged follower can be your strongest supporter or the person organizing your exit. The difference is direction, not engagement.

How do the three followership models compare?

No page in the current search results puts the three side by side. The table summarizes the published models; it is not my framework.

Read across the rows and one thing stands out. Kelley's exemplary follower, Chaleff's partner, and Kellerman's activist-for are the same person from three angles: thinks independently, engages fully, challenges in the open, and stays.

Which followership style is the best?

Every model gives the same answer: the follower who thinks for themselves, engages fully, and challenges the leader inside the room. Kelley says exemplary, Chaleff says partner.

But "best" is the wrong question for a leader to ask, because it treats the type as a hiring specification. The useful question is: which type does my leadership produce?

Run an autocratic style with an experienced team and my own published matrix says the red flag is that "people stop offering ideas." That is Kelley's alienated quadrant, manufactured. Run a democratic style when you hold far more context than the room and you get pragmatists who wait to see which way you lean. The types of leadership styles you run decide the types of followers you get.

What followership type is most common in a growing company?

In my experience, alienated followers, and the company made them. Here is the mechanism I now teach CEOs. Teams are pattern recognition machines. They learn, from your reactions, that speaking up costs something and staying quiet costs nothing.

The A players learn it fastest, because they test the boundary first. Your reactions carry about ten times the weight you feel them at, so you are operating at a volume you cannot hear. And every time you show visible certainty, you teach the room that disagreement is friction.

Run that for two years and you have a team with excellent judgment and no engagement. On Kelley's grid they slid from the star corner to the alienated corner without changing a single belief about the business. They changed their belief about you.

The tell is meetings that are too smooth. Nobody argues, decisions pass, and then the same decisions get relitigated in hallways and quietly not executed. If that sounds like your leadership team, the followership hub covers the leader's side of the fix: what the two seconds after unwelcome truth do to the room, and why "my door is always open" is usually the clearest sign the door is closed.

How do you move a team member from one followership type to another?

You cannot lecture someone from alienated to exemplary. You can change what engagement costs them. Four moves, in order.

1. Ask for the pushback out loud, then wait. From the trust work I publish: open the meeting with "I need pushback, not agreement", state your position, ask "what's your biggest concern about this?", and then wait seven full seconds before you say anything. The silence is the invitation. Filling it cancels it.
2. Thank the disagreement before you evaluate it. "Thank you, that's helpful" is a complete sentence. The room remembers what your face did in the two seconds after the challenge, not what you decided a week later.
3. Reward bad news publicly. In the company I ran we separated the problem from the person, and the person who raised the flag on a problem, including their own mistake, was celebrated for it in front of everyone. Do that once and you have moved three people a quadrant. Punish a messenger once and you have moved the whole room back.
4. Take the rank out of the room where you need the thinking. For design and innovation sessions I set a rule: we leave our titles, authority and responsibility at the door, and in this room we are all the same. People from every level came in, and very sharp people nowhere near the top of the company produced the ideas that grew it. That is exemplary followership produced on purpose, and it cost me nothing but a willingness to be outranked for ninety minutes.

For the implementer who executes beautifully and never challenges, the move is different: give them the decision, not the task. Someone who owns an outcome has to form a view; someone who owns a to-do list does not. How ownership transfers is on the trust-based leadership page, and what the partner's side of that looks like is on how to be a good follower.

Can a follower be more than one type?

Yes, and the honest models say so. Chaleff's partner acts as an implementer on a decision they argued and lost, which is correct behavior, not a downgrade. Kellerman's bystander on one issue is an activist on another.

The person who reports to you is a partner in the product review, a survivor in the budget meeting you already decided, and a bystander on the reorg because nobody asked. Type is a reading of the situation you built. The followership vs leadership page looks at the same person from the other side of the desk, in the moments when the leader has to become the follower.

Types of followership FAQ

What are the 5 types of followers according to Kelley?

Robert Kelley's five types of followership are passive followers (sheep), conformist followers (yes-people), alienated followers, pragmatist followers (survivors), and exemplary followers (stars). They are sorted on two dimensions: the degree of independent, critical thinking and the level of active engagement. Exemplary followers score high on both and passive followers low on both, while alienated followers think independently but disengage and conformists engage fully without independent judgment.

What is the courageous followership model?

Ira Chaleff's courageous followership model, from The Courageous Follower (1995, second edition 2003), sorts followers by the courage to support the leader and the courage to challenge the leader. High support with high challenge is the partner, high support with low challenge the implementer, low support with high challenge the individualist, and low on both the resource. Chaleff also names five courages: to assume responsibility, to serve, to challenge, to participate in transformation, and to take moral action.

What are Kellerman's five types of followers?

Barbara Kellerman's typology in Followership (2008) uses a single dimension, level of engagement, and produces five types: isolates, who are completely detached; bystanders, who observe and do not act; participants, who are engaged for or against the leader; activists, who work hard for or against the leader; and diehards, who are fully committed to the leader or to removing the leader. The model treats opposition as a form of engagement rather than as its absence.

Which type of follower is the most effective?

All three models point at the same profile: a follower who thinks independently, engages actively, and challenges the leader inside the room while remaining committed to the shared purpose. Kelley calls this the exemplary or star follower, Chaleff calls it the partner, and Kellerman's activist who supports the leader fits the same description. Passive and conformist followers execute without judgment, and alienated followers judge without executing, which is why neither is effective on its own.

Is a yes-man a type of follower?

Yes. In Kelley's model the yes-man is the conformist follower: highly engaged, low on independent thinking, and inclined to agree with and defend the leader regardless of the merits. In Chaleff's model the closest match is the implementer, who supports fully and rarely challenges. Both models treat this type as a risk rather than an asset, because the leader's errors get executed with the same energy as the leader's good decisions.

Can a person change their followership type?

Yes. The models describe behavior in a context, not fixed personality. A person can act as an exemplary follower under one leader and an alienated follower under another, and the same person can be a partner on one decision and an implementer on a decision they have already argued and accepted. Leaders shift the distribution by changing what disagreement costs: inviting pushback, thanking it, and rewarding people who surface bad news.

The type you are producing

Read the five Kelley types again and, instead of assigning your team members to them, assign your last three leadership meetings. Which of the types of followership did the room reward? Which got interrupted? Which went home and updated a resume?

The models are useful because they name behaviors. They are dangerous when a leader uses them as labels for other people and never as a mirror. Every quadrant on Kelley's grid is a reading of how safe it is to think out loud near you. The cheapest way to raise the proportion of stars in your company is to change what it costs to be one.

Find out which leader you are before you grade the followers

The style you default to under pressure sets the types of followership you get in the room, and most leaders misjudge their own default. The free leadership assessment takes about ten minutes and returns your primary leadership type, your secondary blend, your default style, and the situations where that default stops working. For most CEOs I work with, one of those situations is the one that quietly produces their alienated followers.

Andreas Pettersson spent ten years as a tech CEO, including his time as one of Canon's youngest CEOs, running a company that grew past 150 people. He founded Leaders ADAPT.