Nit: They're called "Autocratic" (specifically Authoritarian) or "Democratic" styles. [0]
Servant Leadership is what I've found to be most productive when managing developers - the idea that the manager is there as a servant of the team, to remove problems and allow the team to work at their full capacity. However, this assumes that the team wants to work at its full capacity.
I've seen large corporate teams that do not. They clock in a couple of PRs a day, leave their cameras and mics off in meetings, etc. I can understand the desire to get them in the office to control them. But that's not going to solve the problem - you can't force a developer to write good code by standing over them and watching them.
It's a management problem. If the team isn't performing, getting them in the office isn't going to help. Replace the manager with a more effective one.
Unfortunately, that would get in the way of the office-work tradition of using middle management as a reward. If you expect people to actually be good at managing things, that means you can't give out management positions as a reward to anybody who plays the office game well.
This so much. We need to accept that management is a skill not a status, and pay managers according to their ability, education & experience same as we do for everyone else.
A good manager is not ego-driven and is perfectly able to function when being paid less than the people they manage.
And then we can just give people more money and keep them in the role they work best at instead of having to Peter Principle them up to their level of incompetence or lose them.
Servant Leadership is what I've found to be most productive when managing developers - the idea that the manager is there as a servant of the team, to remove problems and allow the team to work at their full capacity. However, this assumes that the team wants to work at its full capacity.
I've seen large corporate teams that do not. They clock in a couple of PRs a day, leave their cameras and mics off in meetings, etc. I can understand the desire to get them in the office to control them. But that's not going to solve the problem - you can't force a developer to write good code by standing over them and watching them.
It's a management problem. If the team isn't performing, getting them in the office isn't going to help. Replace the manager with a more effective one.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_style