Contingency Approach
What is the Contingency Approach?
The contingency approach, otherwise known as the situational approach, asserts that there is not a single management style that is perfect for all organizations. Rather, it claims that each corporation will have to find what suits them best by evaluating the external and internal needs of their organization.
The Basic Idea
“It depends.” It can be pretty frustrating when you’re seeking out an answer and you get the vague, seemingly non-answer of “it depends.” What’s worse is when the other person smiles as if their response was satisfactory!
Is there ever a time when “it depends” is the right answer? According to the contingency approach, yes! The contingency approach to management, also known as the situational approach, holds that there is no single, textbook rule for the best way to manage an organization.1 In each company’s case, the “best” approach will be contingent upon the company’s internal and external needs. Leaders who use the contingency approach are flexible when choosing strategies and adapting to new demands.
The best way to organize depends on the nature of the environment to which the organization must relate.
– Richard Scott, organizational sociologist and author of Organizations: Rational, Natural, and Open Systems
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
