A meta-analysis of Fiedler’s Contingency model of leadership effectiveness
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Fiedler's Contingency Model of Leadership Effectiveness is widely cited, yet highly controversial. The present study subjected Fiedler-based studies to a meta-analysis to determine whether a body of consistent findings would emerge. If such findings did emerge, the aim would be to develop a theoretical framework which would adequately explain them. If they did not, the study would try to explain their absence. The original pool of 402 documents contained 112 primary studies. Of these studies, 38 met the criteria of quality, comparability, and extent of adherence to Fiedler's Model needed for retention in the meta-analysis. These 38 studies contained 249 LPC-performance correlations. These correlations were first analyzed for frequency of support for Fiedler's Model using two indicators: (1) the primary study authors' stated conclusions and (2) directional congruency with Fiedler's predictions. Full or partial support was concluded by 15% and 63%, respectively, of the authors. Directional congruency yielded 54% support and 46% non-support. The second phase of the analysis, in which the within-octant correlations were partitioned by eight different variables, examined both the magnitude and direction using median correlations as the common metric. The extensive disparity between the obtained medians and those predicted by Fiedler led to a third examination using Exploratory Data Analysis techniques. This analysis showed that, regardless of the variable used, there were within-octant differences which prevented not only combining the partitioned data sets but also continuing the meta-analysis. An analysis of the methodological variability in the studies yielded findings important to the continued use of Fiedler's Model. These findings led to several recommendations intended to standardize testing procedures. These recommendations included suggestions regarding greater standardization of score division methods for LPC and GAS, assessment of the three situational variables, and criteria by which to assess support for the Model. Until such standardization is achieved, the validity of Fiedler's Model can be neither confirmed nor disconfirmed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".