A psychology researcher discusses his iconoclastic research and how it revolutionized the scholarship of leadership.
Fred Fiedler
Featured Leadership Topics
Storytelling
“[M]y associates and I found that task-motivated leaders perform best with groups which were different than them, while relationship-motivated performed best with groups which were similar to them in an important dimension.”
Description of the video:
Scarpino: I asked you a question yesterday and I think I didn’t frame it very well, so I’m going to try it again and see how we did. I asked you if you could talk about the scholarship of leadership that existed before your 1967 book came out, and in other words, what was it that you overturned?
Fiedler: Well there were a number of things. One was that leadership was sort of historical, the histories of presidents and management officials, but great men and I had not, I did not overturn that. That’s always been interesting and continues to be interesting. What I, the other part of leadership, the selection and prediction of leadership performance consisted of looking for a trait of leadership, or an attitude, or a personality interview that dealt with the individual’s past and what everybody was looking for was the trait, the leadership attribute, whether a trait or a personality or an attitude. But it was the one leadership trait.
And what I have found, and by the way, others have sort of hinted about that too and it wasn’t a brand new idea, that there were leaders who were concerned with the task, and leaders who were concerned with the group and the personal relationship, and this was sort of vague and very often people sort of danced around that. And I was able to show, I and my students, my associates, were able to show that we were really talking about two different types of leaders. Leaders who were in fact task-oriented, task-motivated, to whom the task was the important part of any of a group enterprise, and also that there was another type of leader whose concern was with the group, with the relationship, and these were two different types of persons, and we were able to measure that with a scale which in fact was called the least preferred co-worker scale. That is, a leader who, a task-motivated leader who was willing to take out somebody who didn’t work on the task or who was a, they were in fact, willing to be punitive to people who didn’t do the job, versus people who were also interested in the task but they were, they were not willing to do that, who were concerned with maintaining the group, meaning cohesiveness.
They were a much softer, had a much more soft attitude toward people who did not perform well, and this was a major difference, and the fact that we put that into a simple scale, an eight point scale, eight attitude, not attitude, eight descriptions of personality scale. It was really unusual, that had been, and showing that this was related to leadership performance had not been done before. The attitude scales which had dealt with task and relationship motivated leaders had been hinted at, and I’m not sure that they hadn’t said so in so many words, but it certainly wasn’t, they certainly did not differentiate them. The main concern was with an attitude scale, with identifying a personality who was a leader.
And in fact, people who are task-motivated tend to think that they’re relationship-motivated and people who are relationship-motivated tend to think that they are task-motivated, which makes a hell of a lot of difference when you try to get an attitude scale to get both which only taps one of these if that many, and the other big thing was that different types of leaders perform better under some conditions and not under other conditions. And specifically, leaders who perform specifically, the degree to which a leader has power, influence, and the most stressed situation tends to be task-motivated, and performs well under these conditions. And a leader who is relationship-motivated performs best in moderately powerful situations and leaders who are task-motivated also perform best when things go to hell. When it’s difficult, when they have stress, when the task is not very easily understood, and that was a big change from what had been done before. In other words, I said that leadership performance is contingent on the leader’s personality and the degree to which the situation provides power and influence.
Scarpino: Do you think that the amount of controversy that your work engendered when it first appeared is in some ways a measure of its impact?
Fiedler: Oh yeah, sure. Look at the controversy that psychoanalysis created. Think of the, there are lots of new ideas which create a lot of controversy and in some cases justified and in some cases not justified or partly justified, but you don’t attack something that’s obvious. You won’t get that published either.
Navigate Change
“I said that leadership performance is contingent on the leader’s personality and the degree to which the situation provides power and influence.”
Description of the video:
Scarpino: I asked you a question yesterday and I think I didn’t frame it very well, so I’m going to try it again and see how we did. I asked you if you could talk about the scholarship of leadership that existed before your 1967 book came out, and in other words, what was it that you overturned?
Fiedler: Well there were a number of things. One was that leadership was sort of historical, the histories of presidents and management officials, but great men and I had not, I did not overturn that. That’s always been interesting and continues to be interesting. What I, the other part of leadership, the selection and prediction of leadership performance consisted of looking for a trait of leadership, or an attitude, or a personality interview that dealt with the individual’s past and what everybody was looking for was the trait, the leadership attribute, whether a trait or a personality or an attitude. But it was the one leadership trait.
And what I have found, and by the way, others have sort of hinted about that too and it wasn’t a brand new idea, that there were leaders who were concerned with the task, and leaders who were concerned with the group and the personal relationship, and this was sort of vague and very often people sort of danced around that. And I was able to show, I and my students, my associates, were able to show that we were really talking about two different types of leaders. Leaders who were in fact task-oriented, task-motivated, to whom the task was the important part of any of a group enterprise, and also that there was another type of leader whose concern was with the group, with the relationship, and these were two different types of persons, and we were able to measure that with a scale which in fact was called the least preferred co-worker scale. That is, a leader who, a task-motivated leader who was willing to take out somebody who didn’t work on the task or who was a, they were in fact, willing to be punitive to people who didn’t do the job, versus people who were also interested in the task but they were, they were not willing to do that, who were concerned with maintaining the group, meaning cohesiveness.
They were a much softer, had a much more soft attitude toward people who did not perform well, and this was a major difference, and the fact that we put that into a simple scale, an eight point scale, eight attitude, not attitude, eight descriptions of personality scale. It was really unusual, that had been, and showing that this was related to leadership performance had not been done before. The attitude scales which had dealt with task and relationship motivated leaders had been hinted at, and I’m not sure that they hadn’t said so in so many words, but it certainly wasn’t, they certainly did not differentiate them. The main concern was with an attitude scale, with identifying a personality who was a leader.
And in fact, people who are task-motivated tend to think that they’re relationship-motivated and people who are relationship-motivated tend to think that they are task-motivated, which makes a hell of a lot of difference when you try to get an attitude scale to get both which only taps one of these if that many, and the other big thing was that different types of leaders perform better under some conditions and not under other conditions. And specifically, leaders who perform specifically, the degree to which a leader has power, influence, and the most stressed situation tends to be task-motivated, and performs well under these conditions. And a leader who is relationship-motivated performs best in moderately powerful situations and leaders who are task-motivated also perform best when things go to hell. When it’s difficult, when they have stress, when the task is not very easily understood, and that was a big change from what had been done before. In other words, I said that leadership performance is contingent on the leader’s personality and the degree to which the situation provides power and influence.
Scarpino: Do you think that the amount of controversy that your work engendered when it first appeared is in some ways a measure of its impact?
Fiedler: Oh yeah, sure. Look at the controversy that psychoanalysis created. Think of the, there are lots of new ideas which create a lot of controversy and in some cases justified and in some cases not justified or partly justified, but you don’t attack something that’s obvious. You won’t get that published either.
About Fred Fiedler
Fred Fiedler was born in Vienna, Austria, on July 13, 1922. He grew up Jewish at a time of rising anti-Semitism, and was just short of 16 when Hitler’s military invaded Austria. Fiedler and his family fled the country, ending up in South Bend, Indiana.
Fiedler served in the U.S. Army during World War II, where he was a firsthand witness to the end of Nazi rule. Upon returning to the United States, he earned his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Chicago in 1949. He also completed a two-year clinical psychology training program from the Veterans’ Administration.
Fiedler’s dissertation brought him to the attention of professionals in his field and initiated a long, distinguished, and influential career as a scholar of leadership. In 1953, he moved to the Psychology Department at the University of Illinois where he began the Group Effectiveness Research Laboratory, which produced path-breaking research on leadership. Fiedler’s contingency model, which employed the least preferred coworker scale, challenged existing scholarship on leadership. In 1967, Fielder published A Theory of Leadership Effectiveness, which remains a landmark work on leadership.
In 1969, Fielder became a professor of psychology and adjunct professor of management and organization at the University of Washington in Seattle. He spent the rest of his career at the University of Washington, where he established an organizational research group. A practical outcome of his scholarship on leadership and his contingency theory was a self-paced leadership training program called “Leadership Match.” Fiedler is a recipient of the International Leadership Association Lifetime Achievement Award.
Explore the complete oral history of Fred Fiedler