Contingency Theory Of Group Performance

George and Jones define leadership as following: “the capability of an individual to exercise influence and control over other members to help a group or organization achieve its goals” . Fred Fiedler developed the contingency theory of leadership . According to this theory leaders have either a task-oriented or a relationship-oriented styles. Both kinds of leaders want their subordinates to perform at a high level and to do all the assigned work. However, leaders who are task-oriented have task accomplishment as their first priority and they push workers to make sure that the work is done. On the other hand, leaders who are relationship-oriented care about developing good working relationships with their subordinates first. According to

Some of them are tasks characteristics and group composition. To begin with, let’s define an important concept that is going to be used when talking about the task characteristics and their effect on the group performance. This concept is task interdependence, which according to George and Jones can be defined as “the extent to which the work performed by one member can affect the work performance of other group members” . An American sociologist, James David Thompson, made a model of group tasks, where identified three types of task interdependence: pooled, sequential and reciprocal. Pooled task interdependence requires each member of the group to do his/her own work as an input to the group performance. It helps to measure individual’s contribution to the group work and award it. Hence, increasing motivation. Sequential task interdependence occurs when members do the group work in a predetermined order . This type of task interdependence makes it harder to identify individual’s contribution as each individual contributes to the same result. Also, the level of the least capable member of the group determines the performance in this case. Hence, there might be many problems arising when this type of task interdependence takes place. Reciprocal task interdependence requires activities of each individual in the group to depend on one another. In other words, the performance of every individual influences the group

Group composition can be considered as the characteristics of members of the group. There are two types of groups: homogeneous and heterogeneous. The first one consists of members who share common characteristics whereas the second one, heterogeneous, consists of members who share less common characteristics. These characteristics may include demographic , psychological or physical characteristics . It can be stated that people get along well with people similar to themselves. Therefore, members of homogeneous groups will be more likely to have friendship relationships with others in the group and, thus, have lower levels of coordination/communication problems and conflicts than those ones in the heterogeneous groups. Hence, the effectiveness of the homogeneous groups can be seen as higher than the effectiveness of heterogeneous groups. However, group members, who share different characteristics, tend to make better group decisions as there are more points of view presented. Such groups also may perform at a higher level because of diversity of resources at disposal. So, all in all, the group composition has an impact on group’s effectiveness, but from different perspectives. Members of homogeneous groups get along well with each other and almost have no conflicts or coordination problems. Members of heterogeneous groups, in turn, make valuable decisions, as there is an enormous amount of