Fiedler’s Contingency Model of Leadership

Fiedler’s Contingency Model of Leadership

• This model is considered as the first leadership model which took the situation as the factor of the leadership and tried to match the good leader for each of the given situation. In this model, the LPC (Least Preferred coworker) was developed to measure the leader’s type where he/she put the concerns. According to Fiedler’s assumption, Low-LPC leaders are more concerned with tasks whereas high-LPC leaders have their concern more for relationships.
  And three primary factors were raised as the variables which influence the effectiveness of a leader in a given situation

1. Position Power

• The ability that afford a leader the ability to reward and punish employees.

1. Task Structure

• Highly structured tasks are generally easy for leaders to evaluate and it give less more control to the leaders.
• Unstructured is very difficult for the leaders to determine the best method of task completion and evaluations of performance are extremely difficult to make.

1. Leader-member relations

• Group atmosphere and degree of confidence, loyalty and attraction that followers feel about their leader.
• Good relationships result in loyalty, affection, trust and respect but poor relationships result in lower motivation and commitment.
  

• Application
  By measuring the LPC score and the three factors, and the evaluation is done whether a leader
  will be effective in a given situation.
  
• Strengths and Weakness

1. Strengths

• This model is good to explain that leaders cannot be always good and effective in every situation.
• From the combinations of situational variables, it can provide good data on leader styles which can be utilized leadership development in organizations.

1. Weakness

• It is hard to apply in practical situation as it gives only 8 types of categories but the real situations we face are not easy to simplify.
• It only advises that either the leader or the situation should be replaced when there is a mismatch between the leader and the situation and it is not enough to prepare the mismatch.
• Fiedler assumed that the leadership style is fixed and is never changed but in the real world the leadership style is sometimes changed.

Hersey and Blanchard’s Situational Leadership Approach

• Hersey and Blanchard suggest that the readiness level of followers plays an important role in selecting appropriate leadership behavior. And it consists of two major components as ability(competence) and willingness(commitment)
  By the readiness level, it was classified as below four levels.

1. R1 - Low ability and low willingness
2. R2 - Low ability and high willingness
3. R3 - High ability and low willingness
4. R4 - High ability and high willingness
   

• Appropriate task and relational orientations for each of the follower readiness levels as the most effective leader behavior.

1. Telling : High task-low relationship
2. Selling : High task-high relationship
3. Participating : Low task-high relationship
4. Delegating : low task-low relationship
   

• Application
  There is one to one matching relationship between leader styles and the readiness levels and the leaders can change the style according to the changing situation on the readiness level. And this is the difference from Fiedler’s Contingency Model of Leadership that they see an organization keep changing or moving and the leader need to notice this change and adjust the leader style.

• Strengths and Weakness

1. Strengths

• Each leader style was suggested to be most effective to the followers in a given readiness level but it is not for just keeping them on that level but encouraging them to be developed more to the higher level.
• It emphasized that the leader has to be more actively react on the followers’ situation.
• It is very practical and easy to approach what style is needed in a given situation.

1. Weakness

• The instrument used to measure the situational flexibility of leader was criticized.
• The styles recommended for each of the readiness levels do not always give the best results.
• The study has not considered the demographic variations such as education, experience, age and gender.
  

Think of some examples from your life and your work to which these theories can be applied.

Situation : I am a small team leader with 3 different type of subordinates. Subordinate A has been in this team for the longest period compared to the others even including me but he has not been promoted for a long time and motivation doesn’t seem to be high. Subordinate B has good interpersonal communication skill and the relationship with the colleagues is good and handles the operations in a stable way. And Subordinate C doesn’t seem to be good at communication with the others but he is enthusiastic for the tasks and for learning new things.

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