Contingency theory predicts that management functions and styles are best when they are carefully tailored to outcomes desired, circumstances facing the organization, tasks involved, and abilities of personnel; conversely, maladapted management styles lead to dysfunctional organizations. Translating this orientation into metaphors, Morgan (1986) described various management types: organizations as machines, organisms, brains, cultures, political systems, psychic prisons, instruments of domination, and flux and transformation.
Contingency theorists suggest the criticality of discrete factors in the situation in which individual leaders operate. These factors influence leader behavior and need to be part of a theory of leadership. That is, leadership must change with the situation or the situation must change to accommodate the kind of leadership exercised. Two versions of this theory are popular. Contingency theory, concerns itself with the cluster of complex forces at work in the corporation that affect leader activity. Organization size, worker maturity, task complexity or other critical contingencies affect leadership action.
Fred Fiedler's contingency theory is probably the best known (Fiedler, 1967). Fiedler was concerned with matching the most appropriate form of leadership with a particular context and to do so he attempted to combine aspects of both trait theory and style theory. In opposition to other theorists he suggested that leadership style grows out of the relatively stable personality traits a person has and will itself, therefore, be pretty well fixed. Fiedler assumed that such leadership styles would be oriented towards one of two positions, being concerned mainly with the task in hand or with interpersonal relationships among the people trying to perform the task. In order to assess where a given leader's position was on this dimension Fiedler developed a questionnaire to measure his or her least preferred co-worker (LPC). The LPC measure consisted of sixteen scales with descriptive adjectives like 'friendly-unfriendly' or 'boring-interesting'.
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