Fieldler's Contingency Model

This blog aims to briefly explain what Fieldler's Contingency Model is.

Fiedler's model states that a managers effectiveness will depend on the situation that they are working in. The situation is defined using: the level of leader-member relations; the level of structure the tasks have and the amount of position power that the leader has.

Fiedler believed that the style of a manager was fixed, and could not be changed. He judged whether a manager was task or people oriented by a scale called the Least Preferred Co-worker (LPC) scale. A high score on the LPC meant the leader was people/relationship oriented and a low meant that the leader was task oriented.

Fiedler predicted that task oriented leaders would give better results in both favourable and unfavourable ends of the scale. However relationship oriented leaders would perform best in a 'middle of the road' scenario.