Contingent Reward Leadership Style Essay

Leadership is meant to create a system to lessen chaos and create order, as well as to improve individuals and teams. The article discusses three leadership styles, which include transformational, contingent reward, and laissez-faire. Transformational leadership is considered active command and uses confidence-building to encourage any followers to rethink and reframe the future to create a positive outlook. Contingent reward leadership, another active leadership, focuses on transparent exchanges and contracts to convey to the followers what is expected of them and what their reward will be once the goal is achieved; however, unlike with transformational leadership, the leader focuses much less on the human resources side of the equation and

It is easy to rule out laissez-faire leadership because, since the leader does not often engage with the followers regarding important matter, the use of humor could be seen as procrastination; it can make followers forget about their dissatisfaction with the leader, since they feel more relaxed, but this still leads to poor performance (Avolio, Howell, & Sosik, 1999). Contingent reward leadership can have a positive effect on behavior when used with humor because it creates a calmer, relaxed work environment and the leader can use humor to make sure that followers understand what needs to be done, which can be seen in the study’s results showing a positive correlation between this leadership and the usage of humor. Unfortunately, only a low amount of humor with contingent reward leadership led to a positive effect on behavior, since using humor more often led to worse performance (Avolio, Howell, & Sosik, 1999). Transformational leadership is the best leadership when combined with humor to create a positive effect on behavior because not only does it also created a relaxed environment and allowed for the leader to check with followers by using humor that they understand what needs to be done, but it shows followers that they can control anything they see out of control through reassurance and by encouraging them to joke about any stressful situations (Avolio, Howell, & Sosik,