Contingency Theory of Leadership transcript

hi this is Steve Wagner and this is a brief presentation on feeder's contingency model of leadership now feeder's contingency model suggests that a Leader's Effectiveness depends on how well his or her style matches the work situation that they have control and influence in feeder's theory started with his observations of clinical psychologists and he didn't originally hypothesize this contingency approach but it ended up in a in a very different place from his original research feedler looked at a person's leadership style using a scale he called the least preferred co-worker scale and so he would ask people to describe the coworker with whom they least preferred to work and the more favorable they rated that person who they least preferred the more he considered them relationship oriented and the lower they rated that person who they least preferred the he would classify them as a task oriented leader now originally feedler believed that the relationship oriented leaders or the high LPC leaders would be more effective than the low LPC leaders just just across the board his research didn't support that hypothesis and so feedler just didn't throw it out and he said well let me see if I can take some other factors into account let's look at the situation so he looked at different characteristics of the situation and how favorable that situation was how much situational control the leader had and he looked a particular in three factors the relation between the leader and the member um how well-liked the leader was whether he or she was trusted and respected the task structure was it something that the group had done before that is well structured cut and dry is it something that's easy to evaluate and then finally he said let's look at the position power how much Authority does the leader have to reward and punish subordinates when he took that into account he found that the effectiveness of the leader depended on both the situational favorability and the leadership style so again using the least preferred coworker leaders are either task oriented or relationship oriented and he looked at situations ranging from very favorable which would be the those on the far left okay where leader member relations are good and the task is highly structured and the leader has a lot of position power and he looked at different combination of those situational factors all the way to the right where we had a very unfavorable situation where there were poor leader member relations and unstructured tasks and weak position power and we can see here that the solid line represents the effectiveness of task oriented leaders and the dotted line is relationship oriented leaders and so what uh feedler found was that under situations that were either highly favorable or highly unfavorable that it was the task oriented leaders that were most effective and it was only in those moderate situations where the there was a mix of these situational factors that the relationship oriented leaders were most effective there's a lot to be said for feeder's model there's been research on it and there is some empirical support for his theory he did a great job applying this theory he created a program called The Leader match program where he would assess leaders and assess situation and make recommendations to organizations on who should be assigned to different leadership positions it really was uh one of the first leadership theories to take the situation into account and and probably it's historical significance is why this theory is is really still something that's important to talk about now there are some weaknesses to this Theory also for one even though the data support the theory um the theory was a post Haw Theory and it's kind of hard to figure out the rationale behind the theory also it's not really clear what that least preferred co-worker scale is measuring it's not like the leader Behavior scales that were developed in uh Ohio State and Michigan also it his approach of saying that you're either relationship oriented or task oriented really that view has gone out of style he he didn't feel like you could switch from one style to the other he said you're either one or the other and that's it and we tend to think of leaders being able to switch between those Styles and that was not part of feeder's theory here is the original reference for feed peder's work as always it's good to go back to that Source material and to to see what the original authors were saying I recommend you do that thank you