How to Apply the Contingency Theory of Leadership
Fred Fiedler, a business and management psychologist,
developed a theory of situational leadership in the 1960s, arguing that
businesses should pair leaders with duties that suit their natural leadership
style. Many decades later, the Fiedler contingency theory of leadership
continues to hold sway in workplaces across the business community.
What Is The Contingency Theory of Leadership?
According to the contingency theory of leadership, different
leadership styles work best in different situations. Fred Fiedler, an
Austrian-born psychologist who taught business and management psychology at the
University of Illinois and the University of Washington, is credited with
developing the modern leadership contingency theory. Here are some of the
theory's components:
Multiple leaders for a wide range of skills: Organizations
function best when they have multiple leaders, each with their own specific
leadership skills, who can work on tasks that best suit their personal
leadership styles, according to the contingency theory of leadership
effectiveness.
Tasks and natural leadership style: Because a leader's style
can easily become ingrained, the contingency approach suggests that
organizations should not force leaders to change their methods whenever a new
situation arises. Companies should instead put their leaders in situations that
will bring out the best in them.
Traits become ingrained: According to Fiedler's theory,
great leaders thrive because of favorable circumstances. In other words,
different circumstances can bring out the best or worst in a person's
leadership abilities. According to Fiedler's contingency theory, a leader with
strong delegation skills should be able to handle situations that require a
leader's ability to share power. However, this type of leader is less likely to
thrive in a situation where all decisions must be made by a single person.
Rather than forcing the leader to change, Fiedler's model suggests that the
company assign the work to someone with different types of leadership
strengths.
Models of Contingency Theories of Leadership
The contingency theory of leadership has given rise to a
number of leadership models that are now used in the study of organizational
behavior. These are some examples:
Least preferred co-worker scale: Fred Fiedler created a
questionnaire to help him distinguish between two types of leaders:
task-oriented leaders and relationship-oriented leaders. He asked organizational
leaders to consider their least preferred coworker (LPC)”the person with whom
they had the least fun collaborating”and to rank the attributes of this
colleague on a scale of one to eight. Fielder classified respondents who rated
their least favorite coworker as "high LPC leaders," or
relationship-oriented leaders. In other words, they valued interpersonal
relationships over other aspects of the workplace. Fielder classified
respondents who rated their least preferred colleagues as "low LPC leaders,"
indicating that they were better suited as task-oriented leaders. These leaders
prioritized a specific situation's task structure. They were more motivated by
great work than by positive leader-member relationships.
Normative Decision Theory: This leadership theory was
developed in 1973 by collaborators Victor Vroom and Phillip Yetton. Arthur Jago
joined the Vroom-Yetton team in 1988 and contributed to the theory. The trio
defined three kinds of leaders: autocratic leaders, consultative leaders, and group-based
leaders. They also created a seven-question rubric for leaders and group
members to use when assessing their decision-making relationship.
Path“Goal Theory: This theory, articulated by Robert House,
was based on the work of Victor Vroom and Martin G. Evans. House identified
four key workplace leadership behaviors: achievement-oriented leader behavior,
directive-oriented leader behavior, participative leader behavior, and
supportive leader behavior. In contrast to Fiedler's contingency model, the
Path-Goal theory proposes that good leaders must adopt different leadership
styles to address different types of employee motivations.
Situational leadership theory: Situational leadership was
developed by Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard between 1969 and 1970. The concept
was included in the team's 1970 text Management of Organizational Behavior.
Leadership styles (or management styles) are classified by Hersey and Blanchard
into task behavior (tactics used to complete a task) and relationship behavior.
They identify four different leadership styles for both task behavior and
relationship behavior, which they label S1 through S4, and range from fairly
autocratic leadership (S1) to highly collaborative leadership (S4). They also
developed a metric called "maturity level," which refers to the team
members managed by a leader. Someone with high competence and commitment to
their job may respond differently to leadership than someone with low
competence and commitment to their job. Blanchard and Hersey grade these
maturity levels from M1 to M4.
Fiedler's work influenced the development of additional
leadership theories, such as the cognitive resource theory, the leadership
substitutes theory, and the multiple-linkage model. All of these leadership and
organizational behavior theories have supporters among contemporary
organizational psychologists.
How to Apply the Contingency Theory of Leadership
The key to implementing the contingency theory of leadership
is to present leaders with scenarios that call on their natural leadership
instincts. Leadership styles, according to Fred Fiedler, become ingrained, and
asking managers to lead differently in different situations could set them up
for failure. Rather than forcing a square peg into a round hole, the contingency
theory of leadership advocates empowering leaders by embracing their core
competencies and keeping them out of situations that conflict with their
leadership style.
In practice, a leader with a low LPC score (someone who
rates their least preferred coworker negatively) should be assigned
task-oriented projects in which high-quality work takes precedence over
leader-member relations. A leader with a high LPC score (someone who gives
relatively high marks to their least-preferred coworker) thrives in a relationship-oriented
project, where camaraderie and trust among team members matter more than actual
work outputs. Organizations can get the most out of their leaders by embracing
these natural competencies.