Fiedler's Contingency Model Summary

INTRODUCTION

Fiedler’s Contingency Model is known as a leader-match theory (Fiedler and Chemers, 1974). This means that it will try to match leaders depending on the situation (Northouse, 2013). The reason for the model being called contingency is because effective leadership is contingent on matching a leader’s style to the right setting (Northouse, 2013). Contingency Theory focuses on leadership effectiveness based on the leader’s style and the type of situation (Ayman, Chemers, & Fiedler, 1995). The model is used to predict leaders, depending on their motivations, who will be successful in high or low control settings (Ayman et al., 1995). The constructs of the model include leader’s characteristics, situational control and leadership effectiveness

According to Northouse (2013), leadership styles are described as task-motivated or relationship motivated. Task-motivated leaders are focus on task accomplishment and reaching their goal (Daft, 2015; Northouse, 2013). Relationship-motivated leaders are sensitive to other’s people feelings and concerned with developing close interpersonal relationship (Daft, 2015; Northouse, 2013). A leader’s style can be measured by the Least Preferred Co-worker (LPC) scale.

IDENTIFY THE LEADERSHIP

The theory has been in vast amount of empirical studies along with two meta-analyses (Ayman et al., 1995). Although both meta-analyses have supported the theory; they both have provided recommendations to improve the theory (Ayman et al., 1995). One of the consistent criticism of Fiedler’s contingency model theory research is that all the studies have a small sample sizes (Peters et al., 1985). With the limited sample size, it makes it impossible to detect the true effects with the correlations (Peters et al., 1985). Since the sample is small, there is no way to use the traditional significance which allows for incomplete support of Fiedler’s Contingency model theory no matter what the results reveal (Peters et al., 1985). Another thing that the Contingency Theory fails to explain is why leadership styles are effective in some situations and not in others (Northouse, 2013). According to Fiedler (1993), he called this the “black box problem” because it cannot be explain why task-motivated are effective in extreme situations and relationship-motivated are effective in moderately situations. According to Northouse (2013), the explanation for why they are effective is not adequate enough for the critics. Another criticism is the application of the Contingency Theory in the real world (Northouse, 2013). This is because determining the leader’s LPC scale and the three situational variables