Fiedlers Original Model of Leadership - Essay Example

To determine the leader’s leadership style, Fiedler created the Least Preferred Coworker (LPC) questionnaire to measure whether a leader is task-oriented or relationship oriented.  The LPC questionnaire has 16 opposing adjectives such as pleasant-unpleasant, efficient-inefficient, open-guarded, and supportive-hostile.  Respondents were then asked to rate their coworkers on a scale of one to eight for each of the 16 contrasting questions.  If the respondent scored in favorable terms with his or her co-worker, it is then said that the respondent is relationship oriented.  In contrast, when the respondent scored unfavorably towards his or her coworker in the LPC, it is then said that the respondent is task-oriented based on Fiedler’s original Contingency Model (Utecht, 1976).

Fiedler’s Contingency Model was then reconceptualized which brought about his Cognitive Resource Theory of Leadership.  This leadership model determines the influence of the leader’s cognitive capacity and experience’s reaction to stress.  The hypothesis of Fiedler’s Cognitive Resource Theory of Leadership are as follows (Vecchio);

1. If a leader is under stress, the leader's intellectual abilities will be diverted from the task. As a result, measures of leader intelligence and competence will not correlate with group performance when the leader is under stress.
2. The intellectual abilities of directive leaders will correlate more highly with group performance than will the intellectual abilities of nondirective leaders.
3. The correlation between leader intelligence and group performance will be higher when the group is supportive of the leader than when the group is not supportive (as a consequence of the need for the group to implement a leader's directions).
4. If a leader is nondirective and the group supports the leader, the intellectual abilities of the group's members will be correlated with the group's performance.
5. A leader's intellectual abilities will be correlated with a group's performance to the degree that the task is intellectually demanding (i.e., necessitates the use of intellectual abilities).
6. When under stress, a leader's job-relevant experience (rather than intellectual ability) will correlate with group performance (141).
7. A leader's directive behavior is a function of relationship- versus task motivation (i.e., the Least Preferred Coworker construct), and situational control influences
8. 
   What type of leader characteristic (more intelligent vs. more experienced) is most suited for high-stress incidents? What type of leader (more intelligent vs. more experienced) is best suited for low-stress planned incidents? When giving your answers provide a detailed example of a police leadership position that would fit the leadership style of more intelligent and more experienced. 

In a study conducted by Vecchio (1990) titled “ “where he tested the relationship of a leader's cognitive ability or intelligence performance in a real-life scenario, he concluded that “the nature of the relationship of the leader to group performance, if there is one, continues to be elusive.    These results indicate that the relationships suggested by cognitive resource theory do not appear to be sufficiently strong or reliable that they can be easily teased out of group performance data”.  Interestingly, the subjects were also uniformed personnel of “forty-eight four-person groups … created from a larger set of Air Force enlisted personnel. These airmen were classmates (i.e., in smaller units of 8 to 12 airmen per class) at an air base in the Midwest” which is very close to a police leadership position, the subjects, being in the armed service also. 

            Being such, we can conclude that in a highly stressful incident, experience is more suited for leadership than cognitive intelligence because it cannot be established by a formal that intelligence is more effective in a highly stressful scenario.  In addition, common sense dictates that in a highly stressful situation, people tend to act more on their instincts than a mental process whose ponderous nature can take some time to decide which could be inimical in a police leadership where rapid response is critical. Further, instinct is not developed by cognition or study but by a collection of experiences of how people will react to a given situation.

3. 
   Next, in your own words, define, discuss, and provide a scenario in a CJ organization of Transactional Leadership, Transformational Leadership, and Visionary Leadership. 
   
   

Transactional leadership is contingent upon making followers obey by means of exchange either by remuneration or by the expectation of rewards (Jamaludin et al., 2011). Transformational leadership is the kind of leadership that produces similar leaders and makes subordinates expect much from themselves and is motivated not by exchange or reward but by a belief towards a common goal and objective (Ismail et al., 2010).  Visionary leadership is the kind of leadership akin to transformational leadership where a leader “articulate, express and share the organizational missions and goals in a simple, easily understood and tangible vision statement. . . [it] develops clarity, focus and flexibility” in an organization (: Dwivedi, 2006).