Analysis Of The Fiedler Contingency Model

Do teams need a leader? What makes a good leader? A leader, as defined by Robbins, De Cenzo, and Coulter (2015), is “someone who can influence others and who has managerial authority” (p. 337). Leadership comes in several different models and theories, with varying degrees of acceptance and rejection as well as success and failure. One such model is The Fiedler Contingency Model. How does this model interact with the most important performance outcomes of teams? There as several theories on leadership, the two that this paper will focus on is the Transformational leader’s theory and the Servant leadership theory. How are these theories being used by today’s leaders? In the next paragraph, we will look at The Fiedler Contingency Model. Fiedler’s

A Transformational leader would elevate the interests of their employees, they would generate awareness and acceptance of the goal for the group. (Bass, B. M. ,1991) An example of transformational leadership in a hypothetical situation would be if there was a monthly goal set for each individual on the team and the leader finished his goals first then went on to help the rest of the team, taking extra time to see every employee as an individual. Another situation would be if a team member had a death in the family and the leader would provide emotional support for the employee as well as rallying the rest of the team to console the team member. Napoleon declared that an army of rabbits commanded by a lion could do better than an army of lions commanded by a rabbit (Bass, B. M. ,1991). The world is full of transformational leaders but we need more. Transformational leadership can be learned, and it can and should be the subject of management training and development (Bass, B. M. ,1991). Next, we will look at Servant

Greenleaf “The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first.” Servant leaders put the needs of the employee first, they do not focus on themselves. A priority is put on meeting the needs of employees rather than one’s self. An example of such leadership in a hypothetical environment would be if a leader helped all team members first instead of himself. A servant leader would be a good listener, must be able to set a vison for employees and trust them. Although servant leadership is unorthodox as it’s difficult to use in an operation and apply in everyday situations. As Greenleaf (1977) stated “it is meant to be neither a scholarly treatise nor a how-to-do-it manual” (p.49). Servant leadership is very different from current views in organizations where often times they put the organizations profits before the individual. One can only hope this theory and model becomes more widely