What Is Contingency & Situational Leadership?
- Contingency theory rests on the notion that a manager's ability to lead depends on the factors in a given situation. Following this thinking, a manager cannot apply one effective leadership style to every situation. He must tailor his leadership style to the situation given the factors with which he is presented. Sometimes a leader will succeed, and sometimes he will fail. A commanding officer in the military gives an order and can usually assume it will be followed. In other situations, he might fail to motivate subordinates, and he must take additional steps, such as providing reassurance, before employees will take action.
- In 1979, Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard proposed the situational leadership model, used by many Fortune 500 companies, the U.S. military and public agencies. In this model, managers choose a leadership style based on the people they have under their control and the amount of support they require. Managers choose the appropriate task and relationship behavior based on the readiness of subordinates, or followers. They might tell subordinates what to do, sell them on what must be done, invite their participation or delegate tasks to subordinates per the situation.
- Both the contingency model and the situational leadership model relate to the management idea that there are different conditions under which managers make decisions. In "Preface to Management," a 2006 management textbook, B.B. Kansal and P.C.K. Rao note six situational factors relevant to defining the appropriate span of control for a manager: (1) work must be routine, (2) operatives are generally stable, (3) work performed by subordinates under one manager is similar, (4) subordinates work autonomously, (5) the department has standardized procedures and methods and (6) work performed does not demand a high level of oversight.
- In designing the leadership structure and assigning managers to roles, the executive leadership team should consider what types of work activities and working conditions managers will face. They can focus later on putting the right managers in the right roles. One way to assign a manager's role relates to both contingency and situational factors. The span of control is loosely defined as how many employees a manager supervises. Another way is according to how many managers, such as five line managers, that a higher-level manager oversees. Executives can adjust the span of control in parts of the organization or change the managers assigned to each unit based on their needs without changing the whole management structure.