Organizational Behavior - Essay Example

He further proposed that leaders who have a higher level of orientation towards relationships are more effective when the situations they experience are moderately or completely under the control of a leader and such tasks are less difficult. Later Fiedler and fellow researchers provided an extension of the contingency theory of leadership; this theory was labeled as cognitive resource theory. Under this theory, Fiedler pays emphasis to the role played by stress in determining the favorableness of a particular scenario and how leaders can react to such situations.

He argues that leaders have to make rational choices, but they fail to make rational choices while dealing with overly stressful situations. Fiedler proposes that in order to counter this issue organizations need to hire those leaders who have the required knowledge, skills and abilities (KSAs) related to the business at hand as those who have the required KSAs will be able to deal with situations where the stress level is quite high. According to the theory of cognitive resource theory, leaders can be divided into two categories.

First are those who are highly experienced and others are those who are high in intellect. . g a problem in a creative manner and in low stress situations there is abundant amount of time for such leaders to think creatively and solve the issue at hand. In case of policing leadership, swat team leaders are those who are highly experienced and are more useful in situations that are highly stressful such as a hostage situation. These leaders use their negotiation ability to talk down the criminal and their experience is of utmost importance as under a hostage situation there are chances that the hostage taker might kill hostages.

On the other hand, crime scene investigators are leaders who are high in intellect and are required in situations where a particular crime scene needs to be looked at in a creative manner. These leaders tend to look at a crime scene from different angles and they analyze a lot of evidence before coming to a conclusion of who committed the crime and how the crime was committed. Those leaders who follow the transactional leadership style are of the perception that employees are motivated due to rewards and in order to motivate them to work hard, leaders need to appraise their work through rewards (Allen, 2010, p.215). For example: a police officer may not risk his/her life in trying to erase crime from the society if he/she believes that the wages he/she is being paid is equal to risking their life.

Thus a transactional leadership will have to reward him with enough wages that is perceived by him/her as equal to risking life in order to motivate them. A transformational leader is one who believes in motivating others through various techniques such as leading by setting an example or encouraging followers to participate in decision making and providing ideas for issues faced by the organization. For example: the chief investigation