Fred Fiedler

Brief Biography

Fred Edward Fiedler was born in 1922 into a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria. His father, who was originally from Prague, ran several small businesses, notably, a wholesale clothing store.

When he was not yet 16 years old, Fiedler left home, mainly due to his being persecuted by his schoolmates (he was the only Jew in his high school class), as well as his unwillingness to work in his father’s business.

With the help of an uncle who lived in Chicago, Fiedler obtained a US visa and traveled by himself to this country in 1938, three months after the Anschluss. He eventually settled in South Bend, Indiana.

Soon afterwards, Fiedler’s parents also left Vienna. By then, the only way out was on a Chinese visa, so they traveled to Shanghai, where they were interned for a decade before finally making their way to the US, where they settled in San Francisco. Fiedler’s grandparents perished in the Holocaust.

Fiedler worked at numerous odd jobs (including as a furrier’s apprentice) while obtaining his high school diploma in two years in South Bend. Afterwards, he worked for two more years before enrolling in Western Michigan College (now Western Michigan University) in Kalamazoo.

In 1942, Fielder was drafted into the US Army, in which he served until being demobilized in 1945. During the war, he mainly worked stateside in administrative support and political intelligence. In 1943 he became a US citizen.

After exiting the Army, Fiedler studied at the University of Chicago, where he earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees all in four years’ time, receiving his PhD in clinical psychology in 1949. At Chicago, he worked under Carl Rogers, among others.

During his graduate work, Fiedler also worked as a janitor, underwent psychoanalysis, and pursued a two-year training program in clinical psychology under the sponsorship of the US Veterans’ Administration.

Fiedler’s doctoral dissertation—an iconoclastic comparative study of the success of competing psychotherapeutic methods—was published as “A comparison of therapeutic relationships in psychoanalytic, nondirective and Adlerian therapy,” Journal of Consulting Psychology, 14: 436–445. It always remained one of his most-cited papers.

The publication of his dissertation to widespread controversy and no little acclaim put Fiedler on the map, professionally. In 1951, he was recruited by Lee Cronbach to teach at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Fiedler started out in the School of Education but the next year moved to the Psychology Department. From 1959 until 1969 Fiedler served as Director of the university’s Group Effectiveness Research Laboratory.

During his time at Illinois, Fiedler published another path-breaking paper, this one putting forward a novel model of the nature of leadership: “A Contingency Model of Leadership Effectiveness,” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 1964, 1: 149–190. This paper was among the most-often-cited and most-influential of all his publications.

Beginning with this paper, Fiedler’s work in organizational psychology was a driving force behind the evolution of the field’s understanding of leadership from the personal characteristics and character traits of leaders to leadership styles and situations.

According to Fiedler’s contingency model, there is no single best style of leadership. Rather, a leader’s effectiveness is considered to be a function of the situation in which he exerts his authority. The model posits two main factors in the determination of the success of leadership: “leadership style” and “situational favorableness” (or “control”).

In 1969, Fiedler moved to the University of Washington at Seattle, where he held positions as Professor in the Department of Psychology and as Adjunct Professor of Management and Organization in the School of Business. At Seattle, he directed organizational research at the Business School until his retirement in 1992.

Fiedler died in 2017 at the age of 94.

Fiedler published several hundred peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, as well as authoring, co-authoring, or editing some dozen books.

Notable Quotes

Note: The original sources of the following quotations attributed here to Fred Fiedler are provided where known. If no specific source is mentioned, then the attributed quotation may be assumed to derive from or (perhaps via paraphrase) be inspired by Fiedler’s many academic and popular writings.

Fiedler on Fiedler

[M]y associates and I found that task-motivated leaders perform best with groups which were different than them, while relationship-motivated performed best with groups which were similar to them in an important dimension.

Interview, Tobias Leadership Center, Indiana University.

I said that leadership performance is contingent on the leader’s personality and the degree to which the situation provides power and influence.

Interview, Tobias Leadership Center, Indiana University.

There was a lot of anti-Semitism in Austria, perhaps more in Austria than in many parts of Germany . . . The Jews were prominent in the arts, the sciences. Vienna was really the cultural capital of much of Europe and a lot of the people in that area of writing and music and poetry and science were Jews. The Jews felt—as my mother drummed into my little head—that having a profession like that, you can take with you.

Interview, “Fred Fiedler—Oral History,” International Leadership Association conference, Boston, Massachusetts, October 28, 2016.

I saw a [psychoanalyst] once a week and we talked. I didn’t feel that this was really exciting stuff, but actually we talked a lot about my parents, particularly my father, who was not the warmest and the cuddliest kind. And after two years, we decided that that was enough. . . . I didn’t have any great insights, but I thought it was reasonably helpful. It was apparent when I was pretty anxious, Chicago was a tough school. . . . And it was helpful, I don’t know. Besides, being in clinical psychology, getting a psychoanalysis was the thing to do—a lot of my classmates did.

Interview, “Fred Fiedler—Oral History,” International Leadership Association conference, Boston, Massachusetts, October 28, 2016.

I thought [my dissertation] was going to be a coup—and it was.

Interview, “Fred Fiedler—Oral History,” International Leadership Association conference, Boston, Massachusetts, October 28, 2016.

I have a knack for [seeing problems]. I was a lousy therapist. I mean it, I was no therapist. No holding of hands, or curing schizophrenics, or even neurotics. But I was a real hand at seeing problems.

Interview, “Fred Fiedler—Oral History,” International Leadership Association conference, Boston, Massachusetts, October 28, 2016.

One of the things that was unusual about my research is that I was always interested in hard criteria, in hard performance criteria.

Interview, “Fred Fiedler—Oral History,” International Leadership Association conference, Boston, Massachusetts, October 28, 2016.

The orthodoxy [in leadership scholarship] was that we were looking for traits and attitudes and God knows what else of leaders, and those were correlated with leadership performance to a very low degree. The way I changed that was in two ways: First of all, I discovered—and other people also were on that trail—that there were two types of leaders: leaders who were task-motivated, to whom the task was the thing and the relationship was secondary, and leaders who were relationship-motivated, that is, the important thing to them, aside from the task, was the relationship within the group and between the leader and the group. . . . The other big thing was that different types of leaders perform better under some conditions and not under other conditions. . . . 

Interview, “Fred Fiedler—Oral History,” International Leadership Association conference, Boston, Massachusetts, October 28, 2016.

People who are task-motivated also perform best when things go to hell, when it’s difficult, when they have stress, when the task is not very easily understood.

Interview, “Fred Fiedler—Oral History,” International Leadership Association conference, Boston, Massachusetts, October 28, 2016.

That was a big change from what had been done before. In other words, I said that leadership performance is contingent on the leader’s personality and the degree to which the situation provides power and influence.

Interview, “Fred Fiedler—Oral History,” International Leadership Association conference, Boston, Massachusetts, October 28, 2016.

Integrity

The most important quality in a leader is integrity: doing the right thing when no one is watching.

Leadership

Leaders are made, not born.

Leadership is not about popularity or charisma; it’s about achieving results through effective management of people and resources.

Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.

Leadership is not about being in charge. It’s about taking care of those in your charge.

The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.

Leadership is not about the position you hold; it’s about the influence you have.

Leadership Effectiveness

Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results, not attributes.

Leadership effectiveness relates to the task-relevant maturity of the follower.

A Theory of Leadership Effectiveness (1967).

No leader is universally effective. The same leader can be effective in one situation and ineffective in another.

Effective leadership is not about being the smartest person in the room; it’s about bringing out the best in others.

Leadership Results

The measure of a leader is not how many followers they have, but how many leaders they create.

Leadership is not about being in control, but about creating a climate where everyone can contribute.

A leader’s job is not to do the work for others, but to help others figure out how to do it themselves.

Leadership is not about being the boss; it’s about inspiring and enabling others to do their best work.

Situational Control

There is no ideal leader. Leadership style is determined by the situation.

Vision

Leadership is the ability to translate vision into reality.

True leadership is about creating a vision that others want to follow, not forcing them to follow.