What Is the Contingency Theory of Leadership?

The contingency theory of leadership states that different leadership styles fit best with specific situations. The modern leadership contingency theory starts with Fred Fiedler, an Austrian-born psychologist who taught business and management psychology at the University of Illinois and the University of Washington. Here are a few elements of the theory:

• Multiple leaders for an array of skills: Under the contingency theory of leadership effectiveness, organizations function best when they have multiple leaders—each with their own specific leadership skills—who can work on tasks that best suit their personal leadership styles.
• Tasks and natural leadership style: Since a leader’s style can become easily ingrained, the contingency approach suggests that organizations should not push leaders to change their methods whenever a new situation arises. Rather, companies should pair leaders with favorable situations that bring out their best.
• Traits become ingrained: Fiedler’s theory argued that great leaders thrive due to situational favorableness. In other words, different situations can bring out either the best or the worst in a person’s leadership skills. Fiedler’s contingency theory suggests that a leader who possesses great delegating skills should have the opportunity to handle situations that call out for a leader’s ability to share power. Yet this type of leader would be less likely to thrive in a situation where all decision-making must run through a single individual. Rather than force the leader to change their ways, Fiedler’s model states the company should assign the work to someone else with different types of leadership strengths.

The contingency theory of leadership has produced a number of leadership models used in the study of organizational behavior. These include:

• Least preferred co-worker scale: Fred Fiedler developed a questionnaire that helped him describe two types of leaders: task-oriented leaders and relationship-oriented leaders. He asked organizational leaders to think about their least preferred coworker (LPC)—the person with whom they least enjoyed collaborating—and asked that they rank this colleague’s attributes on a scale of one to eight. Fielder deemed respondents who gave their least preferred coworker relatively high marks as “high LPC leaders,” or relationship-oriented leaders. In other words, they prioritized interpersonal relationships over other aspects of a work environment. Fielder categorized respondents who rated their least preferred colleagues quite low on the LPC scale as “low LPC leaders,” which made them better suited as task-oriented leaders. These leaders prioritized the task structure of a particular situation. They drew more motivation from producing great work than from healthy leader-member relations.
• Normative Decision Theory: This leadership theory comes from collaborators Victor Vroom and Phillip Yetton, who developed it in 1973. In 1988, Arthur Jago joined the Vroom–Yetton team and made his own contributions to the theory. Together, the trio described three types of leaders: autocratic leaders, consultative leaders, and group-based leaders. They also developed a seven-question rubric that leaders and group members could use to evaluate their decision-making relationship.
• Path–Goal Theory: Articulated by Robert House, this theory built upon the work of Victor Vroom and Martin G. Evans. House identified four principle leadership behaviors that manifest in workplace environments: achievement-oriented leader behavior, directive-oriented leader behavior, participative leader behavior, and supportive leader behavior. In contrast to the contingency model developed by Fiedler, the Path–Goal theory suggests that good leaders must assume different leadership styles to address different types of employee motivations.
• Situational leadership theory: Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard developed the situational leadership in a period spanning from 1969–1970. The team included the concept in their 1970 text Management of Organizational Behavior. Hersey and Blanchard break leadership styles (or management styles) into task behavior (tactics used to complete a task) and relationship behavior (tactics used to manage relationships). For both task behavior and relationship behavior, they identify four different leadership styles, which they label S1 through S4 and range from fairly autocratic leadership (S1) to highly collaborative leadership (S4). They also created a metric called “maturity level,” which refers to the team members that a leader manages. A person with high competence and high commitment to their job may respond to a different type of leadership than someone with low competence and a low commitment to their job. Blanchard and Hersey rank these maturity levels on a scale of M1 to M4.

Fiedler’s work inspired even more leadership theories, including the cognitive resource theory, the leadership substitutes theory, and the multiple-linkage model. All of these theories of leadership and organizational behavior have their adherents among contemporary organizational psychologists.

The key to applying the contingency theory of leadership is to pair leaders with scenarios that draw upon their natural leadership instincts. Fred Fiedler believed that leadership styles become ingrained, and asking managers to lead differently in different situations could set them up for failure. Rather than force a proverbial square peg into a round hole, the contingency theory of leadership advocates empowering leaders by embracing their core competencies and keeping them out of unfavorable situations that clash with their leadership style.

In practice, a leader with a low LPC score (someone who rates their least preferred coworker in a critical manner) should receive task-oriented projects where high-quality work matters more than leader-member relations. A leader with a high LPC score (someone who gives their least-preferred coworker relatively high marks) thrives in a relationship-oriented project, where camaraderie and trust among team members matter more than the actual work outputs. By embracing these natural competencies, organizations can get the most out of their leaders.

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