Fred Fiedler

Fred Edward Fiedler (1922 to 2017) was an Austrian-American industrial and organizational psychologist best known for his work on leadership and contingency theory. Born in Vienna, he left Austria for the United States shortly after the Anschluss of 1938, became a US citizen in 1943, served in the US Army, and took his doctorate in clinical psychology at the University of Chicago in 1949. He joined the University of Illinois in 1951, where he directed the Group Effectiveness Laboratory, and from 1969 until his retirement in 1992 he directed organizational research at the University of Washington. In 1967 he introduced the contingency model of leadership, later called the Fiedler contingency model, which helped move the field away from trait-based and purely behavioral accounts of leaders toward the idea that a leader's effectiveness depends on the situation.