Contingency Theories of Leadership 3

In the last byte, we looked at the concept of Least Preferred Coworker and the scale used. In today's byte, we look at the situations factor's influence in Fiedler's Contingency Theory.

In the beginning of our discussion on Fielder's Contingency Theory, we had mentioned that there are three dimensions that influence the leader's style of leadership. These are:

1. Task Structure: The degree of clarity, or ambiguity, in the work activities assigned to the group. This includes the number and clarity of rules and regulations and procedures for getting the work done.
2. Position Power: The authority associated with the leader's formal position in the organization. This includes the leader's legitimate authority to evaluate and reward performance, punish errors, and demote group members.
3. Leader-Member Relations: The quality of interpersonal relationships among a leader and the graph members. The quality of leader-member relationships is measured by the Group-Atmosphere Scale, composed of nine eight-point bipolar adjective sets.

A favorable leadership situation is one with a structured task for the work group, strong position power for the leader, and a good leader-member relation. An unfavorable leadership situation is one with an unstructured task, weak position power for the leader and a moderately poor leader-member relationship. Between these two extremes, the leadership situation has varying degrees of moderate favorableness for the leader.