Fiedler’s Contingency Leadership Theory

Contingency/ Situational Theories-

• • Sometimes the success of a leader does not depend upon the qualities, traits and behaviour of a leader alone.
  • The context in which a leader exhibits her/his skills, traits and behaviour matters.
  • Theory views leadership in terms of a dynamic interaction between a number of situational variables – the leader, the followers, the task situation, the environment, etc.
    1. Fiedler’s model,
    2. Hersey and Blanchard’s Situational theory,
    3. Leader-Member Exchange theory,
    4. Path-Goal theory
    5. Leader-Participation model

Fiedler’s Contingency Leadership Theory

• Fred Fiedler (1967)– first person to develop a comprehensive model for the contingency theory of leadership.
• Premise – effective performance of an organization or a group of people in an organization highly depend upon the style adopted by a leader and the degree to which a situation gives control to the leader.
• Fiedler developed ‘Least-Preferred Coworker (LPC) Scale–
• The leaders were asked to give their preference on the employee with whom they have least preference to work with.
• If described in favourable terms, –‘relationship-oriented’
• If rated in unfavourable terms, ‘production-oriented’

Fiedler has identified 3 situational factors, for effective leadership-

1. Leader-Member Relations: The degree of confidence, trust and respect that members have on their leader;
2. Task Structure: The degree to which the job assignments are structured or unstructured;
3. Position Power: The degree of influence a leader has over power variables such as hiring, firing, discipline, promotions, and salary increases.

Criticisms of Fiedler’s Contingency Leadership Theory

• The major drawbacks – the style adopted by a particular leader is fixed.
• Assumption -a leader can follow only a particular style in any given situation
• It suggests-

1. Change of a leader to fit a situation Or
2. Change the situation to suit the leader.

• That is by restructuring tasks or increasing or decreasing the power positions, the leader is expected to bring the situation under control.
• It is useful but the practical application is highly questionable.
• In practice, it is generally difficult to assess how good the leader-member relations are, how structured the task is, and how much position-power a leader has (Robbins, Judge, & Sanghi, 2007).