1.1 Evaluation of Leadership Theories. There are many leadership theories and the main purpose of all of them is to highlight the factors on which leadership depends to generate best performance in an organization. Two most important and prominent categorization of leadership theories are contingency and situational theories.
Contingency theories of leadership explain the factors on which it has to depend to produce best performance; these factors could be either internal or external. As word contingency means dependency, reveals that according to these theories best performance solely depends upon certain situations. There are certain contingency theories like path-goal theory, leader substitutes theory, the multiple linkage model, LPC contingency theory and cognitive resource theory.
Fried Fiedler who worked on the characteristics and personality of the leaders gave LPC model to Identifying leadership style. He believed that the style of leadership is fixed, and it can be measured by applying a scale he created called Least-Preferred Co-Worker (LPC) Scale. Application of Fiedler’s contingency model comprise of following steps. First to identify our leadership style by using LPC scale, then to identify the situation in which he is playing his role through settled criteria and finally to determine the most effective leadership style. We can evaluate that Contingency theories illustrates that an improvement in overall efficiency of employee is mostly related to the situation, task, characteristics of employees and culture of organization.
Kenneth Blanchard and Paul Hersey’s theory of situational leadership is basically comprise of three dimensions; two about the leaders and one