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Hughes: Leadership, 4e
Leadership: Enhancing the Lessons of Experience, 4/e
Richard L Hughes, Center for Creative Leadership
Robert C Ginnett, Center for Creative Leadership
Gordon J Curphy, The Blandin Foundation

Contingency Theories of Leadership

Chapter 12 Summary

This chapter is designed to provide an overview of four of the more well-known contingency theories of leadership, which include the normative decision model (Vroom & Vetton, 1973), the situational leadership model (Hersey & Blanchard, 1984), the contingency model (Fiedler, 1967), and the path-goal theory (House & Dessler, 1974). All four models are fairly similar in that they specify that leaders should make their behaviors contingent on certain aspects of the followers or the situation in order to improve leadership effectiveness. In addition, all four theories implicitly assume that leaders can accurately assess key follower and situational factors. However, as the material regarding perception in Chapter 3 shows, it is entirely possible that two leaders in the same situation may reach very different conclusions about followers' level of knowledge, maturity, the strength of leader-follower relationships, the degree of task structure, or the level of role ambiguity being experienced by followers. These differences in perception could lead these two leaders to reach different conclusions bout the situation, which may in turn cause them to take very different actions in response to the situation. Furthermore, these actions may be in accordance or in conflict with the prescriptions of any of these four theories. Also, the fact that leaders' perceptions may have caused them to act in a manner not prescribed by a particular model may be an underlying reason why these four theories have reported conflicting findings, particularly in field settings.

Another reason these theories have generally found mixed support in field settings concerns the fact that they are all fairly limited in scope. Many of the factors that affect leader and follower behaviors in work group, team, or volunteer committee settings are not present in laboratory studies but often play a substantial role in field studies. For example, none of the models take into account how levels of stress, organizational culture and climate, working conditions, technology, economic conditions, or type of organizational design affect the leadership process. Nevertheless, the four contingency theories have been the subject of considerable research, and even if only mixed support for the models has been found, this research has succeeded in adding to our body of knowledge about leadership and has given us a more sophisticated understanding of the leadership process.





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