Contingency Theory

            This week we will be discussing Contingency Leadership, which I find to be a popular theory because it’s a lot like businesses today. I am a believer that for a business to be successful it must be willing to adapt to the market, customer and economy. This is very similar to contingency leadership because it’s the theory that leadership styles should vary from situation to situation. The reason they vary is because of the followers, task at hand, and the leader. I think this leadership style has a lot of value in business and any leadership role today. I have coached football for 7 years and when I first started coaching I was authoritative towards all the players because I believed in treating them all the same. What I realized was, while you can do that, it may be more productive for the team if you change your style from player to player. Some people or in this case players react better from different leadership styles. Some people may need you to be more authoritative with them and they’ll be more successful, while others may react better to a different style. A great example of this is John Wooden, former and late coach of the UCLA Bruins basketball team. He won 10 national championships which is still a record today for men’s college basketball. He was never a man that yelled or berated his players. He once said, and I am paraphrasing, “I have 10 players on my team and 10 different coaching styles”. Understanding that not every player or situation can be handled with the same leadership style is important. If you’re a manager of a warehouse and you need a shipment to be pulled immediately for a next day air, your style of leadership would be different for your team compared to something that didn’t have the urgency.

            All three theories (Ohio State, Michigan and Iowa) are essentially the same thing, but with different names for their definitions. The Iowa style uses the terms autocratic and democratic to define their two leadership styles. The autocratic leadership style makes decisions, tells employees what to do, and closely monitors them, while the democratic style encourages participation from workers, works with employees on what decisions to make, and doesn’t closely monitor employees (Lussier & Achua, 2018). These two styles are styles that I have heard of before and I believe are common. The Michigan style has two categories, job-centered and employee centered leadership styles. The job-centered style has the leader closely monitor the employees, they’re very direct with goals, and they will tell employees what and how to do things, while employee-centered style has a leader who is more employee relationship based, they look out for the employees, develop trust, support, and respect (Lussier & Achua, 2018). The Ohio State style has two leadership types, initiating structure behavior and consideration behavior. Lussier and Achua say that the Michigan and Ohio State styles are similar, but I think when you look at the definitions for all three styles, they are very similar. In my opinion I can’t say that one is better than the other because I think they’re all two similar, but I would go with one I like the Iowa theory. The reason I say that, is the Iowa theory uses autocratic and democratic, and I am familiar with those terms in relation to behavior and leadership.

Lussier, R.N., & Achua, C.F. (2018). Leadership theory, application and skill development.

(6 ed.). Cengage Learning.