Fred Edward Fiedler
Fred Edward Fiedler
(born 1922) was one of the leading scientists in Industrial and
organizational psychology of the 20th century. Fiedler was business and
management psychologist at the University of Washington. Fred Edward
Fiedler helped this field move from the research on traits and personal
characteristics of leaders, to leadership styles and behaviours. In 1967
Fred Fiedler introduced the contingency modeling of leadership, with the
now-famous
Fiedler contingency model.
To Fiedler, stress is a
key determinant of leader effectiveness (Fiedler and Garcia 1987;
Fiedler et al. 1994), and a distinction is made between stress related
to the leader�s superior, and stress related to subordinates or the
situation itself. In stressful situations, leaders dwell on the
stressful relations with others and cannot focus their intellectual
abilities on the job. Thus, intelligence is more effective and used more
often in stress-free situations. Fiedler has found that experience
impairs performance in low-stress conditions but contributes to
performance under high-stress conditions. As with other situational
factors, for stressful situations Fiedler recommends altering or
engineering the leadership situation to capitalize on the leader�s
strengths. Despite all the criticism, Fiedler's contingency theory is an
important theory because it established a brand new perspective for the
study of leadership. Many approaches after Fiedler's theory have adopted
the contingency perspective.
Fred
Fiedler�s situational contingency theory holds that group
effectiveness depends on an appropriate match between a leader�s style
(essentially a trait measure) and the demands of the situation. Fiedler
considers situational control the extent to which a leader can determine
what his or her group is going to do to be the primary contingency
factor in determining the effectiveness of leader behavior.
References
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiedler_contingency_model
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Fiedler |
