Fiedler’s contingency theory of leadership: Definition, examples

Editor’s note: This article was reviewed and updated on 22 January 2025 by Dr. Bart Jaworski with information about key aspects of Fiedler’s contingency theory, examples of contingency theory in action, and more.

Imagine stepping into a leadership role for a team with a very low morale and sense of purpose. In theory, the challenges ahead are clear: establishing trust, setting priorities, and driving progress. However, how do you decide the best leadership approach for this situation? Should you focus on building relationships first, or dive straight into getting the business foundations in order?

Leadership is situational, and success often hinges on a leader’s ability to adapt their approach to meet the needs of their team and the specific challenges they face. This is where Fiedler’s contingency theory provides a practical framework, offering insights into how you can align your style with situational demands to maximize effectiveness.

What is Fiedler’s theory?

Fiedler’s contingency theory, also known as the contingency model of leadership, proposes that there’s no universal “best” leadership style. Instead, the ideal approach depends on the context, including the nature of the task, your team’s dynamics, and your relationship with the team. This theory emphasizes that effective leadership arises from the alignment of leadership style and situational factors.

Contingency theory was first introduced by Fred Fiedler, a prominent researcher in organizational psychology during the 20th century. Rather than categorizing leaders as either bad or good, Fiedler’s contingency theory emphasized aligning necessary leadership traits with specific challenges.

Fiedler’s contingency theory can be used by to:

• Adapt leadership styles to meet situational needs — For example, adopting a task-oriented approach during a high-stakes product launch or a relationship-oriented approach when onboarding new team members
• Balance task-focused and relationship-focused strategies — Depending on the dynamics of the team, you might focus on building camaraderie during times of low morale or prioritize efficiency during a crisis
• Refine communication strategies — Remote teams may benefit from structured, task-driven communication, while in-person teams might thrive with relationship-building activities

Key components of Fiedler’s theory

At its core, Fiedler’s theory categorizes leadership styles into two main types:

• Relationship-oriented leaders, who prioritize building strong interpersonal connections, fostering trust, and resolving conflicts
• Task-oriented leaders, who focus on setting clear goals, establishing processes, and achieving results efficiently

The effectiveness of these styles is influenced by situational favorableness, which is assessed through:

1. Leader-member relations — The level of trust and respect between the leader and the team
2. Task structure — The clarity and specificity of the tasks at hand
3. Leader-position power — The degree of authority and control the leader has over the team

The theory also includes the leader’s least preferred coworker (LPC) score, a tool that further helps in understanding your natural inclination. The score determines whether you lean more toward relationships or tasks in your leadership approach.

This theory is significant because it shifts the conversation about leadership from rigid labels like “good” or “bad” to a dynamic understanding of contextual alignment. It underscores the importance of adaptability in leadership and helps you recognize when to adjust your style or delegate to others who may be better suited for a particular situation.

Benefits of Fiedler’s contingency theory in product management

Contingency theory presents several advantages for managers. Given that you often collaborate with cross-functional teams, it’s crucial to understand how to effectively respond to a range of personalities and employee needs.

Encourages self-reflection with leadership styles

Contingency theory pushes you to evaluate their natural tendencies and consider how these align with the needs of your team and situation. You can use tools like the least preferred coworker (LPC) scale to understand your leadership orientation (whether it’s task-focused or relationship-focused) and identify areas for growth.

Prioritizes situational awareness over fixed leadership

The theory emphasizes adapting to the situation rather than expecting one leadership style to work universally. To achieve this benefit, you should assess team dynamics using situational factors such as task structure, leader-member relations, and positional power to adjust leadership strategies accordingly.

Facilitates leadership determination for specific scenarios

Contingency theory provides a structured way to evaluate who is best suited to lead in a given context. Thus, when you’re building cross-functional teams, you should use the framework to match the right managers with projects based on their strengths and situational demands. For example, a task-oriented leader for a high-pressure product launch should be chosen.

Enhances team awareness and identifies skill gaps

By focusing on the connection between leadership style and team dynamics, the theory promotes a deeper understanding of team capabilities and areas for improvement. Research by Gallup reveals that highly engaged teams (often resulting from leaders effectively delegating tasks based on team strengths) show 21 percent greater profitability.

To boost that engagement, conduct team assessments to identify gaps in skills, experience, or confidence. Based on the results, you can divide responsibilities accordingly, ensuring tasks are assigned to team members whose strengths align with project requirements.

Provides guidance for choosing leadership styles

The model offers clear criteria for determining the most effective leadership approach in a given scenario. Using those, you can create a decision matrix to evaluate selected factors before initiating projects and decide whether a directive, collaborative, or hands-off leadership style is appropriate.

Improves delegation and decision-making

Understanding situational needs helps you delegate more effectively, ensuring that responsibilities are aligned with individual team members’ strengths and readiness.

A study published in the International Journal of Economics and Business Administration found a clear, positive correlation between effective delegation and employee performance. Utilize situational favorableness to prioritize tasks and allocate resources efficiently. For example, consider delegating highly structured tasks to junior members so they can build confidence while reserving complex, high-stakes responsibilities for senior team members.

Builds resilience and adaptability in leadership

By encouraging you to remain flexible, the theory fosters a mindset of continuous learning and adjustment, crucial in dynamic fields like product management. To achieve this benefit, you need to incorporate regular team retrospectives to evaluate what leadership approaches worked and what could be improved, fostering an iterative process of leadership refinement.

How to apply Fiedler’s theory

To apply this theory effectively, follow these actionable steps tailored to real-world workplace contexts:

1. Identify your leadership style

Start by understanding your natural leadership tendencies using tools like the LPC scale. This test reveals whether you’re more task-oriented (focused on getting things done efficiently) or relationship-oriented (prioritizing team harmony and trust). In this step, reflect on past experiences where you excelled as a leader. Note whether you are naturally focused on processes and efficiency or fostering collaboration and trust.

2. Gather feedback from your team

Your perception of a situation might differ from your team’s. To avoid misjudgments, seek input from team members about task clarity, workplace dynamics, and their trust in leadership. It’s best to issue anonymous surveys to gather honest insights into team satisfaction, task understanding, and potential gaps in your leadership.

3. Improve situational favorableness

Leadership effectiveness depends on situational favorableness, which includes leader-member relations, task structure, and positional power. Thus, in this step work on strengthening these factors to create an environment where your leadership style thrives. What you want to do here is:

• Build trust — Foster open communication through regular check-ins and transparent decision-making
• Clarify tasks — Break down objectives into smaller, structured steps for better understanding
• Seek authority — Pursue opportunities to lead higher-level projects or gain more influence in decision-making

For a high-stakes product launch, you can improve favorableness by setting clear milestones and creating a detailed roadmap that minimizes ambiguity.

4. Understand your team’s needs

Knowing your team’s individual goals, skill sets, and motivations enables you to align tasks with their strengths. This boosts morale and ensures productivity. You will need to maintain an ongoing dialogue with team members about their career aspirations and adjust roles to match their capabilities.

5. Regularly assess the situation

Your working conditions and demands are constantly evolving due to internal and external factors. Regularly evaluate the situational context to adjust your leadership style accordingly. To achieve this:

• Monitor external factors, such as market trends or policy changes, that might impact your team
• Use retrospectives or post-mortem meetings to evaluate how leadership decisions affected outcomes

If you do that you’ll be able to easily adapt when a sudden increase in customer demand shifts priorities. This might call to adopt a task-oriented style to ensure deadlines are met efficiently. Conversely, in periods of low pressure, focus on team building and skill development.

Common mistakes to avoid

Before we move on, make sure to review the following mistakes that frequently occur with Fiedler’s theory:

1. Misjudging situational favorableness — You always run a risk of overestimating team trust or clarity of tasks. To mitigate, regularly check in with the team to validate assumptions and recalibrate leadership strategies
2. Relying too heavily on one leadership style — You really need to be flexible and adapt to the demands of the scenario
3. Ignoring team feedback — It’s not hard to start believing in your own skills too much and assuming you know what’s best without consulting your team. Avoid that by creating feedback loops to ensure your approach aligns with team needs and perspectives
4. Focusing solely on short-term outcomes — You might be tempted to prioritize immediate results at the expense of long-term team morale. Instead, balance task-focused actions with relationship-building efforts
5. Neglecting self-awareness — Similarly, you may fail to recognize your own leadership tendencies or biases. Use tools like the LPC scale and retrospectives to continuously evaluate and improve your leadership approach

Comparing Fiedler’s theory to other contingency models

Over time, four distinct contingency theories have been developed. While they all adhere to basic principles, each one exhibits slight variations.

Fiedler’s model of contingency theory

The Fiedler model is the original contingency theory. To apply it, you must possess situational awareness and understand your own leadership style.

The Fiedler model uses a scale known as the Least Preferred Coworker (LPC) as a guide to evaluate a coworker they find most challenging to work with:

A high score indicates that the leader is an HPC leader with a strong tendency toward being relationship-oriented — ideal for situations like conflict management and morale building. Conversely, a low score suggests that the leader is an LPC leader who is more task-oriented. These leaders are better suited for project management and logistical tasks.

Once you’ve identified your leadership style, it’s time to assess situational favorableness. This is determined by three variables that significantly influence a product manager’s ability to lead effectively:

• Leader-member relations — The extent to which a manager is liked by their team
• Task structure — The degree of organization of a task or process and whether it’s understood by the team
• Leader-position power — The amount of formal authority a manager has over their work

These characteristics determine situational favorableness. More favorable situations require task-oriented leaders, while less favorable ones benefit from relationship-oriented leaders.

Situational leadership model

Unlike Fiedler’s model, the situational leadership model allows greater flexibility in adapting your approach based on circumstances. It focuses on the team’s maturity before determining an appropriate leadership style:

Maturity often refers to aspects such as team members’ experience, autonomy, willingness to take responsibility, confidence, and capability. This model outlines four leadership styles:

1. Delegating style — Ideal for experienced and capable team members; this style involves assigning tasks or leading projects
2. Participating style — Used when building confidence in team members; this style often involves one-on-one mentoring sessions where ideas are shared and collaboration occurs
3. Selling style — Designed for team members who lack motivation or initiative; this style aims at persuading team members to complete their tasks
4. Telling style — Beneficial for inexperienced team members; this approach involves giving directions and closely supervising them until they mature

Path-goal model of leadership

The path-goal model, also called the path-goal theory, centers around employees and their individual goals. In this model, you assist your team members in developing daily, weekly, or career goals and then collaborate with them to achieve those objectives.

The aim of the path-goal model is to enhance employee motivation and productivity by fostering job satisfaction:

This approach requires you to be highly adaptable since you need to tailor your leadership style according to each individual’s needs. You also need awareness of your employees’ skill sets and what areas may require coaching for success.

There are four different leadership styles within the Path-Goal model:

• Directive clarifying leader — This type of leader provides explicit instructions on specific tasks they want their team members to accomplish. Teams with ambiguous or unstructured roles may benefit most from this type of leadership
• Achievement-oriented leader — Leaders who manage confident high-achievers may set high expectations and goals while encouraging autonomy at work
• Participative leader — These leaders solicit feedback from employees before making decisions — typically effective in small teams or when employees have vested interest in outcomes
• Supportive leader — Alongside productivity concerns, supportive leaders care about employees’ well-being and mental health — taking into account individual employee preferences

Decision-making model

The decision-making model focuses on how decisions are made, which ultimately determines the relationship between a leader and their team members:

This model outlines five leadership styles:

• Autocratic (A1) — The leader makes decisions independently without input from their team
• Autocratic (A2) — The leader makes decisions independently but gathers information from their team first
• Consultative (C1) — The leader makes decisions independently but gathers information from individual team members first
• Consultative (C2) — The leader makes decisions independently but frequently gathers information from team members before doing so
• Collaborative (G2) — A group discusses the situation collectively and makes decisions together through voting

Table 1: The comparison of four contingency theories

Contingency theory example in practice

Suppose you’ve just been hired as a product manager at an established company. According to Fiedler’s model, leader-member relations would initially be poor because you’re new and haven’t yet built trust with the team. The task structure is high due to the company’s established nature, but your leader-position power is low as a junior manager.

In this case, adopting a relationship-oriented leadership style could help improve relations with your new colleagues while also paving the way for advancement within the company.

Limitations and criticisms of contingency theory

Fiedler’s contingency model, while groundbreaking, has faced several critiques over the years. Some of these include:

Inflexibility in leadership style

Fiedler’s model assumes that leaders are inherently either task-oriented or relationship-oriented, with little room for adaptability. In dynamic workplace environments, where situations and team needs evolve, this “binary” approach might not fit well. Leaders who are encouraged to remain static may miss opportunities to grow and meet their team’s changing demands.

While it’s true that Fiedler’s model suggests aligning leadership styles with situations, combining it with adaptive frameworks like the situational leadership model can address this limitation. For example, you could use Fiedler’s insights to identify your dominant style but also work to develop the flexibility needed to adjust your approach as team maturity or task complexity changes.

Subjective nature of the LPC scale

The least preferred coworker scale is a central tool in Fiedler’s model, used to identify a leader’s natural tendencies. However, the scale’s subjective nature has drawn a fair share of criticism. Leaders may struggle to provide unbiased evaluations of their least preferred coworkers, skewing their results. Furthermore, an LPC score might reflect temporary frustrations rather than a leader’s true orientation.

If you want to achieve an unbiased result, use the LPC scale as one of several tools to understand leadership tendencies. You can also ask team members to help you out with it.

Overemphasis on replacing leaders

The model suggests that when a leader’s style doesn’t align with situational demands, replacing the leader may be the best course of action. This view may undervalue a leader’s ability to grow and adapt, and it often overlooks organizational costs, such as disruption, loss of institutional knowledge, or strained morale.

Thus, instead of replacing leaders, you can focus on training and development programs to help adapt styles to different situations. For example, task-oriented leaders could be coached on building stronger interpersonal relationships.

Limited scope for modern, hybrid work environments

Fiedler’s model was developed at a time when traditional, hierarchical team structures were common. In today’s hybrid and remote workplaces, where collaboration occurs across time zones and cultures, the model may not account for the complexities of modern leadership dynamics.

If that’s the case for your company, adapt Fiedler’s principles to hybrid environments by focusing on virtual leadership strategies. For instance, a relationship-oriented leader might prioritize building trust through regular video check-ins, while a task-oriented leader might focus on creating clear virtual workflows and milestones.

Simplistic View of Situational Favorableness

The model reduces situational favorableness to three factors: leader-member relations, task structure, and positional power. While these are important, they may not capture other critical dynamics, such as team culture, organizational politics, or external pressures.

That said, there’s no Fiedler’s contingency theory of leadership police that would stop you from broadening the assessment of situational conditions by including additional variables like team diversity, stakeholder complexity, or market dynamics.

By acknowledging these critiques and implementing solutions and workarounds, you can leverage Fiedler’s contingency model as a valuable starting point rather than a fixed framework.

5 FAQs about Fiedler’s contingency theory

To help answer any questions you might still have, here are the five most asked questions about Fiedler’s contingency theory:

1. What is Fiedler’s contingency leadership theory?

Fiedler’s contingency theory is a leadership framework that proposes no single leadership style is universally effective. Instead, a successful leader depends on how well their style aligns with the situation, including the task, team dynamics, and organizational context. Leaders are categorized as either task-oriented or relationship-oriented based on their leadership tendencies.

2. What is Fiedler’s contingency theory assumption?

The core assumption of Fiedler’s theory is that the effectiveness of leadership depends on both the leader’s style and situational conditions. It assumes that a leader’s natural style is relatively fixed and that success arises from placing leaders in situations where their style is most effective rather than expecting them to adapt completely.

3. What are the three elements of Fiedler’s contingency model?

The model identifies three key situational factors that determine favorableness:

1. Leader-member relations — The degree of trust, respect, and confidence between the leader and team members
2. Task structure — How well-defined and structured the tasks are
3. Leader-position power — The amount of authority and influence the leader has within the organization

4. What is an LPC score?

The least preferred coworker (LPC) score is a tool used in Fiedler’s model to determine whether a leader is more task-oriented or relationship-oriented. Leaders rate the person they least prefer working with on a scale measuring qualities like friendliness, cooperativeness, and dependability. A high score indicates a relationship-oriented leader, while a low score suggests a task-oriented leader.

5. What are the key principles of contingency theory?

The key principles of contingency theory include:

• Leadership effectiveness depends on the alignment between leadership style and situational factors
• Situational favorableness is influenced by leader-member relations, task structure, and leader-position power
• Leaders are generally more effective when placed in situations that match their natural style
• Flexibility and adaptability are critical for managing diverse scenarios effectively

Final thoughts

Fiedler’s contingency theory offers a valuable framework for understanding the dynamic relationship between leadership styles and situational demands. By recognizing that no single leadership approach fits all scenarios, this theory empowers you to align your strategies with the unique needs of your teams and tasks.

Whether you’re navigating high-pressure deadlines, fostering team collaboration, or resolving conflicts, the adaptability encouraged by Fiedler’s principles can lead to more effective leadership and improved team outcomes.

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