Contingency Theory Essay

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The meaning of contingency theory is one thing depends on other things. An effectiveness of a leader must be well fix between its style and behavior and the condition of the situation. A leadership style work in one situation might not necessary work in other situation. In contingency theory, leadership style describe as task-oriented or relationship-oriented. A relationship-oriented leader established respect, mutual trust and listen to employees needs. A task-oriented leader is motivated by task accomplishment. Next, task-oriented provide clear directions and set performance standards. The theory provides effectively matching the leader and situation. The most important elements to contingencies are the situation and followers. In contingency approach it’s surrounding with leader, followers and situation. The three main factors of contingency approach are leader member relations, position power and task structure. Task, structure, context, and environment are important to leadership style. Fiedler’s contingency model, situational theory, path-goal theory and Vroom-Jago contingency model developed the contingency model by Fiedler and his associates.

The Fiedler’s contingency model was design to diagnose leadership style and situation in organization. The principle of this model is In Fiedler’s contingency model styles is task-oriented or relationship-oriented. To measure leader styles, Fielder’s developed the Least Preferred Coworker (LPC) scale. When leaders who score high on this scale, which are relationship oriented and those who score low on this scale are describe as task oriented. A task-oriented leader builds respect, mutual trust and listens to employee’s needs. A relationship-ori...

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...riented leadership and participative leadership (House & Mitchell, 1974, p. 83). Path goal theory attempts to combine the motivation principles become a theory of leadership. This makes path-goal theory unique because no other leadership approaches deal with this way. The other strength of path goal theory that is leaders clarifies the paths to the goals and helps remove any difficulties for the subordinates. The disadvantage that is path goal theory has not examined the basic motivational assumptions of the theory. Next, most leadership scholars agree that path-goal theory has not been adequately tested (Thomas, P. D. G. 1971). Path goal does not describe how a leader could use different styles to help subordinates feel assured of success. For example, path-goal theory does not explain how directive leadership increase subordinate motivation during ambiguous task.

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