Revitalizing America through struggle and threat: The contingency approach to President Joe Biden’s pandemic leadership
Revitalizing America through struggle and threat: The contingency approach to President Joe Biden’s pandemic leadership

Summary/Abstract: This study seeks to demonstrate the effectiveness of President Joe Biden’s lead-ership in the first year of his presidency in the context of the Contingency Theory proposedby Fred E. Fiedler (1967). This article argues that the effectiveness of Joe Biden’s leader-ship is contingent upon his relationship-based motivational system (high LPC score) andmoderate power, control, and influence over American society. Specifically, the findingsrevealed that, while his relationship-oriented leadership style, which fell into Octant V ofthe model, predisposed him to collaborative forms of power (Griebie and Immelman 2020:17, Körner et al. 2022: 636), the results of my study show that his leadership effectivenessoperates through a coercive type of power, emotionalisation, and anticipatory action. Thisarticle aims to fill the gap in organisational studies on leadership effectiveness and pres-ents a novel approach for examining variables in the model to account for the linguisticpotential in the paradigm. It indicates the usefulness of the notions of the seven standardsof textuality, speech acts, and coercion as a research apparatus supplementing the Contin-gency Model. The study also draws on correlational patterns identified in the analysis. Themain results suggest a moderate positive correlation between the category of CC (cognitivecoercion) and EC (emotive coercion), and strong positive correlations with the variablesof struggle, threat, and praise. The analysis contributes to research on presidential rhetoricand, more specifically, the role of the president in managing crisis and adapting to change.

• Details
• Contents