Wishful Thinking

Abstract

In Fiedler's theory of leadership, two types of leaders, relationship oriented and task oriented, are identified by their ratings of the least preferred coworker (LPC) that they have known. The rating scale primarily measures the extent to which the coworker is friendly or unfriendly plus some items that measure the degree of task orientation. Data from 20 groups of managers in the United States suggest that Fiedler had his types reversed. The manager whose ideal is relationship oriented gives low ratings on friendliness. Ratings by university students in England, where few have an ideal that is extremely task oriented, suggest that Fiedler may have been gathering datafrom leaders who combine a task and relationship orientation, because these people, using Fiedler's LPC scale, do give lower ratings to their least preferred coworker than relationship-oriented people.