When Jim became manager of the tire shop, the team was hostile and angry, constantly bickering and complaining at one another, and worst of all, they tended to take it out on customers. Work wasn’t getting done, customers were frustrated, the yelp score was low, and the shop was losing business as a result. On his first day, Jim immediately called a meeting where he stated that whoever didn’t properly do their work would be reprimanded, receive a dock in pay for lack of work, or fired. He handed out new quota requirements for all of them completing oil changes and tire rotations in faster times than ever before, and said he expected them to meet the new quotas within a week. Over the course of the next week, one worker came in late several times, and appeared to be the least motivated of the group, pulling others into his slacking time with him. After warnings, Jim told him to go home for the day, causing him to lose a day’s wages. The other workers quickly began to get into shape, and amazingly, within the week, the quotas were met. While there were a lot of grumblings behind his back at first, things eventually began to calm down. More customers started coming in and they started maintaining more repeat customers as the completion time improved. While Jim didn’t appear to prioritize the feelings of the team, his no-nonsense task focused approach actually turned things around.

 

Part of the contingency model of leadership is the leader-member relationship and more specifically, what kind of atmosphere has been created by the relationship dynamic (Fiedler & Chemers, 1974). How confident and loyal followers feel toward the leaders has as much of an impact as how the leader is able to perform as his or her own skills and abilities.

Imagine you are a leader in a situation where the atmosphere could easily be described as ‘bad’ at best, if not hostile. Trust has broken down, a project has failed, team members are all pointing fingers in every direction and people are angry. Now you come in as the leader. How would you handle this? It turns out that certain preferred leadership styles actually perform well in this type of situation. (Fiedler, 1967) Those with a low LPC (least preferred coworker) score clearly show a tendency to do well in both extremely positive situations where things are already going great, or extremely negative situations where there are some serious problems that need to be solved. So what does this mean?

Having a low LPC score tends to show that you are task oriented: you focus on getting the job done, and getting the task at hand completed, regardless of the cost to the relationships involved within the team setting.

 

Fiedler, F. E. (1964). A contingency model of leadership effectiveness. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 1, pp. 149- 190). New York: Academic Press.

Northouse, Peter G. (2012-02-02). Leadership: Theory and Practice (Kindle Locations 2746-2747). SAGE Publications. Kindle Edition.

Northouse, Peter G. (2012-02-02). Leadership: Theory and Practice (Kindle Locations 2509-2510). SAGE Publications. Kindle Edition.