Contingency Theory / Situational Leadership Theory

As we learn more about leadership theories, we realize that as time passes by we have more types of leaders. We have moved on from saying he is a “good” or “bad” leader, now we can describe their behavior, interaction with followers and be able to say why we think he is good or not.

The situational leadership theory tells us that in order to be a successful leader; the manager should not only use his/her natural management style, but use one that fits the situation. My question is: is a leader able to change his/her management style when they face certain situation? For example, if a front desk manager is in a stressful circumstance where the guest is extremely rude to an employee, will he/she be able to hold his/her natural reaction and think “This is X type of situation, so I need to use Y type of management style”? I honestly think that doing this is really hard because when we are under pressure we usually use our instinct and don’t have time to choose a management style to solve the problem. However, I found useful the way this theory divides the behavior styles in different situations because followers can use them as a reference to describe their leaders in certain circumstances and they can even rate themselves by figuring out if they have low, some or high readiness to have more responsibilities in their job.

The second theory I will talk about is the contingency model which states that the leader’s effectiveness is based on ‘situational contingency’ which is a result of interaction of: leadership style and situational favorableness. Once you answer a few questions about your least preferred co-worker, the results will tell you if you are a leader with human relations or task orientation. I believe this model forces people to fit in one or the other category, so it doesn’t give us a lot of options. Furthermore, it doesn’t have a category for the intermediate favorability; it just tells us it is "human or task oriented" even if the person is not a 100% human or task oriented. In my case, I consider myself a task oriented person at work, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t have interaction with my coworkers. I believe people just act according the situation they face.

As you can see both theories relate the manager style and the situation to select a type of behavior for each case. Yet, I still believe that the theories are forcing us to label people, which is not good because we change all the time due to more factors than just situation and style.