[MUSIC] So the perspective we have now is called contingency theories. And I expect that this is a perspective that you use quite a bit in practice in thinking about leadership and about many other things because basically this theory says it depends right? We've seen the trait perspective in which leader, in which we consider the characteristic that people have. We've considered the behavioral perspective, focusing on what leaders do and a contingency perspective is a continuation of those behavioral theories basically by saying we should not only look at what people do, but we really should take into account what people do in different situations. And it says effective leadership depends on the situation and it depends on the followers that you have. And let me show you two specific perspectives that take into account this contingency thinking. The first is a model called situational leadership, as developed by Hersey & Blanchard. So the situational leadership model looks like this. As you see, we have two dimensions of leadership. We have leadership supportive behavior which is again this more relationship oriented type of behavior. So the leader helps, the leader shows concern, the leader is approachable for helping employees doing their work. The second dimension is leader directive behavior and this is the type of behavior where leaders very clearly set directions, they say what we should do, how should we do it, when we do it. It's very specific in the direction that of the behavior that he or she wants to see from followers. So on these two dimensions leaders can be either low, so very little support or be very high, show very high support. Along the same line, the leaders can be very low in directive behavior. That means basically that the leader is allowing followers is allowing his or her people to decide many things by themselves, or in contrast if the leader is very high on this behavior very high in direction setting, basically the leader says where we go, what to do. Based on the combination of being either high or low on any of these dimensions, we see four combinations in this model of specific leadership styles let's say, specific set of patterns, specific ways of how leaders interact with followers. The first is a delegating style. So, this is a style in which a leader shows little direction setting and also in fact relatively little support. So, this is a leadership styling basically where the leader is there in the background but in practice is allowing his or her followers to do many things themselves. They can decide how they approach the task, how they do things and of course the leader would be there in case problems arise, in case there is any issues, but basically people can work out for themselves, delegating. The second style, supporting. This is a leadership style in which the leader still shows very little directive behavior, but does show a bit more support. So this is where leaders are very actively involved in supporting people to go into the right direction. Third dimension is coaching. So this is a leadership style which is characterized by relatively high direction setting and also relatively high support. How does this look like in practice? Well this is the leader says what he or she wants to do, in which direction people should act, what should be done, where it should be done. But in this process in fact allows a lot of input from the people itself. So you see this combination is slightly different by the former style that I mentioned which was more supportive. Because in this coaching style a leader in fact is more active in setting the direction in this, in the direction that the leader foresees for the collective goal. And now we have the fourth style left which is directing. This is infect a leadership style which is very high in direction settings of really the leader tells what to do and allows very little input from the employees here. So the way you should read it Is that these are four different leadership styles characterized by different behaviors on either the support or the direction setting dimensions. And in the ideal scenario, a leader would be able to demonstrate all these different styles of behavior. So you see already here that there is a bit of a difference with the behavioral theories that we discussed before. Because in these theories, it was more or less implicitly assumed that a leader had, let's say, a favorite style and that the leader would be relatively inflexible in switching between different approaches. Here Hersey and Blanchard say very explicitly that they want leaders to be flexible in the style they use, and they want them to make an active decision on when to use which style. [MUSIC]