Contingency Theories

Pre-Contingency: Focus on the Individual

The scientific study of leadership began in the early part of the twentieth century when the development of intelligence and personality trait measures commanded the attention of many psychologists. Early leadership researchers searched for a “leadership trait,” that is, some stable aspect of an individual's personality that would make them a good leader. Leaders and followers in many types of organizations were compared on many different traits, such as intelligence, dominance, social sensitivity, introversionextroversion, and originality, among others.

After several decades of trait research, Ralph Stogdill completed a comprehensive review of those studies. He found very few strong relationships among the traits and measures of leadership emergence or effectiveness and little consistency of findings across studies. In a prescient analysis, Stogdill concluded:

Leadership researchers did not abandon the focus on individual aspects of the leader, but shifted their inquiry away from personality toward behavior. Early studies by Kurt Lewin and his colleagues reported findings indicating that “democratic” leadership styles, allowing for more follower input in decisions, were superior to “autocratic” styles in which a leader made all decisions without consultation. However, follow-up studies revealed that the relative effectiveness of autocratic and democratic leadership depended in part upon the degree of independence desired by the followers—again revealing complex interactions between leader and follower characteristics.

Another popular approach was to identify the specific behaviors used by leaders and to determine which behaviors were most effective. A group of Ohio State University investigators led by Carroll Shartle developed the leader behavior description questionnaire (LBDQ) to measure and categorize leader behavior. The two most prominent categories of behavior were called “Consideration,” which referred to a leader's attention to the feelings, needs, and morale of subordinates, and “Initiation of Structure,” which referred to leader behaviors focused on task accomplishment. Similar categories of behavior were found in studies employing interviews of workers and observations of students working in groups. Unfortunately, the consistency of research in identifying task-focused and interpersonally focused behavioral categories was not matched by consistent findings relating the categories to important leadership outcomes.

Pre-Contingency: Focus on the Situation

The failure to find individual leader characteristics that predicted leadership effectiveness led to research about situational variables. It was found, for example, that people were more likely to become chosen as leaders of a group if they occupied a central rather than peripheral position in the group's communication structure.

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