Contingent leaders are flexible in choosing and adapting to succinct strategies to suit change in situation at a particular period in time in the running of the organization.
About the same time, investigators from the University of Michigan's Survey Research Center conducted interviews and distributed questionnaires in organizations and collected measures of group productivity to assess effective leadership behaviors.
Historically, contingency theory has sought to formulate broad generalizations about the formal structures that are typically associated with or best fit the use of different technologies.
The perspective originated with the work of Joan Woodward (1958), who argued that technologies directly determine differences in such organizational attributes as span of control, centralization of authority, and the formalization of rules and procedure.
A major empirical test was furnished by Johannes M Pennings who examined the interaction between environmental uncertainty, organization structure and various aspects of performance.
Pennings carried out an empirical study on a sample of retail brokerage offices in which aspects of their market environment such as competitiveness, change and munificence, versus organizational arrangements such as decision making templates, power distribution were juxtaposed for possible implications for performance.
[10] Management and organization is an ‘Open system’, which embrace anomalies or challenges every now and then, which requires ‘adaptable’ and ‘situational’ solution in order to overcome or solve the problem or issue concerned.
Numerous interests may either conflict or else agree however yet may aim in different directions, and as such are context to complexity in the pursuit of organizational objectives as well as the fulfillment of purpose itself.
Actors must therefore choose from a wide array of alternatives when considering what is the best model for stakeholder management in a particular situation, so as to facilitate the sustained efforts and performance of organization, financially as well as looking at the broader scope of organizational objectives with a holistic view.
[14][15] The first major strength of the contingency theory is that it has the support of an abundance of empirical research (Peters, Hartke, & Pohlman, 1985; Strube & Garcia 1981).