ACTION LEADERSHIP, MULTI-CONTINGENCY THEORY AND FIT

What is a good measure for an action-oriented leadership style to employ in the Multi-contingency Model? We develop leadership dimensions of delegation and uncertainty avoidance using factor analysis and test its implications, here on strategic implementation. An explore-exploit view of strategy is similarly confirmed using factor analysis. Using these complementary measures, we test four misfit hypotheses. Of the four, the data from medium-sized Danish enterprises support two hypotheses: a strategy of low exploration is a misfit with a leadership style of high delegation; a strategy of low exploitation is a misfit with a leadership style of high uncertainty avoidance. For researchers, an action-oriented leadership approach is integral to the multi-contingency theory and greatly enriches our theory of organizational design. For CEOs, leadership is made operational and action-oriented to solve problems and resolve misfit conditions for good performance.