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The emergency leadership model suggests that good leadership depends on multiple factors, including the situation and other personnel. Fiedler’s contingency leadership model challenges traditional models by ranking different people as the best leader in different situations based on their leadership style and situational favorability. Changing the situation may be more efficient than changing leaders.
An emergency leadership model is a theory about human behavior in an organizational context, particularly in an industry. The idea of the model is to reflect the belief that how management is defined is more complicated than a single quality of ‘leadership’. The best-known model of emergency leadership instead states that good leadership can depend on multiple factors including other personnel and the specific situation.
Traditional management models have worked on the basis that leadership itself is a quality. They said the best leaders had specific traits that demonstrated this quality. Applying these models rigorously involved comparing two people and showing one as a better leader, making them better suited for a managerial role.
This was challenged by manager psychologist Fred Fiedler, who in 1976 introduced Fiedler’s contingency leadership model. He believed that leadership is more complex and influenced by multiple factors. As a result, the model of him might rank different people as the best leader in different situations.
The first element of Fiedler’s model concerns the leadership style of individuals. One measure of this is asking people to rate others they’ve worked with for a variety of qualities. In fact, the test isn’t designed to see how these people rank, but rather to look at the general pattern of rankings each person provides, known as the least cooperative score, or LPC. The model suggests that those who score higher generally place more emphasis on personal relationships, while those who score lower are generally more task-oriented. Which is most effective as leadership style can vary from case to case.
The second element of the emergency leadership model is known as situational favorability. This is a three-factor assessment of the specific situation at hand. They are: how much trust and confidence there is between the leader and other staff; how clearly the tasks to be performed by the group are defined; and how powerful the leadership position is. A strong rating in each category means that the overall situation is considered favorable, while a weak rating – little trust, no clearly defined tasks, little power for the leader – means an unfavorable situation.
According to Fiedler’s model, whenever there is an extremely favorable or extremely unfavorable situation, a leader with a low LPC score will be more effective. For those where the situation is not extreme, such as a mix of strong and weak ratings for the three situational factors, a leader with a high LPC score will be more effective. Those who follow Fiedler’s model believe that these schemes mean that it can often be more efficient to change the situation than to change leaders. For example, you may need to give a leader more or less power or put more effort into clearly defining a task.
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