Different leadership styles are appropriate for different situations. Management writers including Fiedler, Tannenbaum and Handy have identified various factors as relevant.
| Leader-Member Relations (Respect, Trust) | Good / Poor |
| Task Structure | Structured / Unstructured |
| Position Power and Authority | High / Low |
Gauge Situation Favourableness
| Very Favourable | Task-Oriented |
| Moderately Favourable | Person-Oriented |
| Very Unfavourable | Task-Oriented |
The following diagram represents
a combination of these factors.
Implications for Action
Enterprise design should be based on an assessment of the complexity of a given task, together with an assessment of the urgency of a given requirement for change.
Design tasks to fit the abilities of the team. Each team should have some simple and some complex tasks. Design organizations and systems with a mix of leadership styles, so that the organization culture is not fixed at either end.
Moving towards the participative end of the spectrum is valuable for several reasons. It improves the quality of working life for the team, which is in turn likely to have a good effect on the quality and productivity of their work. It also reduces supervision costs and increases bottom-up organizational learning. However, if the organizational culture is fixed at the participative end of the leadership spectrum, this may make it more difficult in future to impose top-down change.
The implementation of complex systems is usually a highly complex task, and requires the knowledge and skills of the ‘followers’ as well as the ‘leaders’. However, radical change is often prompted by organizational crisis. In such circumstances, there may be little opportunity for extensive discussion and participation.
Avoid simply dividing people into ‘leaders’ and ‘followers’. Consider multiple leadership patterns (distribution of authority), where not all leadership roles reside in one person/agent. (For example, one person may have technical authority, in the sense of being deferred to for technical decisions, without having direct control over investment.)
If people are able to acquire leadership positions gradually, rather than all at once, this increases opportunities for personal growth, to both individual and collective advantage.
Fred Fiedler, ‘Engineer the job to fit the manager’ Harvard Business Review 5, 1965
Charles Handy, Understanding Organizations (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976) pp 96 ff
Robert Tannenbaum & Warren Schmidt, How to choose a leadership pattern (Harvard Business Review 2, 1958)
Wikipedia: Fiedler Contingency Model, History of Contingency Models of Leadership
Originally posted at http://www.veryard.com/orgmgt/leadership.htm
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