Blanchard zigarmi & zigarmi 1985

texts, although often without substantive critique. Academic leadership texts, however, frequently omit it entirely or position it as a footnote given its near total lack of empirical support (Graeff, 1983, 1997; Thompson & Vecchio, 2009; Yukl, 2013). To complicate things, the evolution of situational leadership reads like a bad episode of reality television—shifting claims, altered premises, a split between the creators' approaches to and uses of the concept, and the equivalent of academic throwdowns challenging the legitimacy of the concept. So, why include it in this text? Situational leadership persists as a popular tool for teaching and explaining leadership across disciplines. Indeed, the terminology of situational leadership seems to have slipped into the language of how leadership is informally described even when it is not tied explicitly to the theory itself. Despite being deeply flawed, situational leadership has a definitive influence on the informal theories people hold.

Overview The premise of situational leadership is that there is no single “best” way to lead and that to accomplish goals leaders must adapt their behaviors to meet followers' needs under varying contextual conditions (Blanchard, Zigarmi, & Nelson, 1993; Blanchard, Zigarmi, & Zigarmi, 2013; Hersey & Blanchard, 1969; Hersey, Blanchard, & Johnson, 2013). Leaders' behaviors fall along two continua: supportive and directive. If these sound familiar, they should. They mirror the task and relational metacategories advanced by style leadership, along with the ways in which the continua interact as outlined by the Leadership Grid. What situational leadership adds is consideration of how the context shapes followers' needs, which are framed as a function of their development (i.e., varying levels of commitment and competence). Follower development, in turn, dictates the leader style that should be employed to maximize leadership outcomes.

Although situational leadership represents a fairly straightforward approach, explaining the specifics can be tricky because its authors have generated multiple versions—and when I say multiple versions I mean lots and lots of versions. For the sake of space and clarity, we will use Situational Leadership II (Blanchard et al., 2013), but let me walk through a few important elements of how we even get to this version.

Whose Theory Is It Anyway?

Hersey and Blanchard (1969) codeveloped the original situational leadership theory along with early revisions. However, the two parted intellectual paths in the late 1970s … sort of. They continued to publish a management text together that features situational leadership (Hersey et al., 2013) but also developed separate consulting firms and independent revisions of the concept. Hersey's work is now referred to as the situational leadership model, while Blanchard and colleagues' is called Situational Leadership II. Confused yet?

What's This Based On?

Situational leadership's major contributions were theoretically justified using Korman's (1966) proposition that there may be a curvilinear relationship between task and relational

Dugan, J. P. (2017). Leadership theory. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2017-06-22 08:36:2