Contingency approaches to leadership

Contingency approach

 Contingency approaches to leadership suggest that situational factors  must be considered 

 One kind of behavior may work in one setting but not in another

  The goal of contingency approaches is to identify the situational  variables that managers need to consider in assessing how different forms of leadership will be received. 

There are three popular contingency theories of leadership:

(i) The LPC model:  Fieldler‟s Contingency Theory

(ii) The Path Goal Model

(iii) The Participation Model: Vroom-Yetton

Theory The LPC model: Fiedler’s Contingency Theory.

  Fred Fielder was one of the leading advocates of the contingency (situational) theories.   He developed a model called the “Least Preferred Co-Worker” (LPC)  Fiedler‟s Contingency Model argues that performance or effectiveness is dependant upon the interaction of leadership style and the amount of control that the supervisor has over the situation.

 According to him leaders become leaders not only because of their personality but also because of the various situational factors that they face. 

 He came up with three critical dimensions of leadership situations that affect leader‟s style.

(i) Position power: amount of power attached to the leader‟s position (the degree to which a position enables a leader to get enough members to comply with his directions).

(ii) Task structure: the degree to which the task assignments are clear to both the leader and the subordinates (how much each person knows his roles).

(iii) Leader member relations:  refers to the degree of confidence, trust and respect followers have for the leader.  (The extent to which members like and trust a leader and are willing to follow him).

From these situations Fiedler identified two basic leader orientations:

(i) Task oriented:  Whereby a leader gains satisfaction  from seeing tasks performed (concerned with the accomplishment of the task).

(ii) Relationship oriented:  people oriented style where the leader aims at achieving good interpersonal relations.

 These two orientations are measured by the “least Preferred Co-Worker” (LPC) scale. 

 The LPC approach calculates  the degree to which  leaders favorably perceive worst co-workers and it relates to leadership style. 

 On the LPC scale, an individual is asked to think of the person with whom he or she has worked with, who was least preferred as a co-worker and to describe this person on several bipolar scales (gloomy-cheerful, tense-relaxed, trustworthy, untrustworthy).

 If the description of the Least Preferred Co-worker is favorable, then this suggests a relationship-oriented leader; an unfavorable description on the other hand, suggests a task-oriented leader. 

 When Fielder combined LPC scores with situation favorableness, he found out that the relationship –oriented Leaders were more effective in facilitating group  performance when the situation was moderately favorable or moderately unfavorable.

 On the other  hand, the task –oriented leader was more effective in securing group performance when the situation is either highly favorable.

 Fielder concluded that “Leadership Performance” depends both on the  organization and situation.

 The LPC model sees appropriate leadership behavior as a function of the favorableness of the situation as defined by the three situations.