Describe The Differences Between The Universal And The Contingency Leadership Theories
9. Describe the differences between the universal and the contingency leadership theories. Explain your answer in sufficient detail to demonstrate your understanding. Be specific using the materials in your text and not a generalized or philosophical statement. Hint: both the trait and behavioral leadership theories were attempts to find the “one best leadership style in all situations”; thus they are called universal leader theories.
According to Stogdill and Mann, it was illustrated that traits were considered a mutual concept after conducting several researches. The end result of those researches proposed that individuals were considered leaders dependent on the given situation that they were in. In my current duty position, the engineers are all subordinates, but when we are out on a field test, each one in individually recognized as a group leader. They acknowledge their roles as a supervisor or leader, and they take charge of the group. In this position they, do not need additional supervision from the organization to carry out the task. This concept falls under the contingency leadership theory. The leader is charismatic and the group is willing to follow. In this same environment, when delegating on the spot individual tasking to subordinate group members, the leader is making universal leaders for different task to be accomplished. For example, I am assigned to a recovery team. All members of my team are on the parachute recovery detail for the Orion space capsule, and we are all lead by a subordinate engineer. Once we reach the impact zone, the engineer takes lead and appoints each one of us to a specific task. My task is to take a few guys and properly recover the drogue parachute using my expertise. Now that I’ve broken away with my own group, I’ve become a universal leader. I was allowed to conduct my recovery using my vision, and abilities to motivate my group to do it in an efficient manner. That was more of a transformational trait
According to Stogdill and Mann, it was illustrated that traits were considered a mutual concept after conducting several researches. The end result of those researches proposed that individuals were considered leaders dependent on the given situation that they were in. In my current duty position, the engineers are all subordinates, but when we are out on a field test, each one in individually recognized as a group leader. They acknowledge their roles as a supervisor or leader, and they take charge of the group. In this position they, do not need additional supervision from the organization to carry out the task. This concept falls under the contingency leadership theory. The leader is charismatic and the group is willing to follow. In this same environment, when delegating on the spot individual tasking to subordinate group members, the leader is making universal leaders for different task to be accomplished. For example, I am assigned to a recovery team. All members of my team are on the parachute recovery detail for the Orion space capsule, and we are all lead by a subordinate engineer. Once we reach the impact zone, the engineer takes lead and appoints each one of us to a specific task. My task is to take a few guys and properly recover the drogue parachute using my expertise. Now that I’ve broken away with my own group, I’ve become a universal leader. I was allowed to conduct my recovery using my vision, and abilities to motivate my group to do it in an efficient manner. That was more of a transformational trait