The History of Contingency Theory

By Victor Hoang · Updated Oct 24, 2026

The problem was practical. Managers had a shelf of principles. They had no reliable way to tell which ones applied to their own plant. Taylor had said one method was always best. Fayol had said it depended. Field studies in the 1950s and 1960s began to show what it depended on.

Contingency theory took shape between the 1950s and 1967. Field studies in British factories and American firms kept finding the same thing: the best way to organize depends on the circumstances. Joan Woodward, Tom Burns and G. M. Stalker, Paul Lawrence and Jay Lorsch, and Fred Fiedler each reached that conclusion on their own. Their evidence differed. The throughline is a rebellion against the "one best way" that earlier management writers had promised.

This page follows the people who did that work, and what happened to the idea afterwards. For the leadership version of the theory, start with what contingency leadership theory is. For the family of ideas around it, see the schools of management thought, in order and the full history of management.

Timeline at a Glance

The One Best Method (1911-1920s)

Taylor promises certainty while Fayol and Follett hedge

Picture a steel works where a pig-iron handler's day is broken into measured loads, with a target of 47 tons per man per day. That is the world Frederick Taylor describes in The Principles of Scientific Management (1911). His central claim is that among the many methods used for any job, one is always quicker and better than the rest, and that careful study will find it. The story of that idea and its backlash is in our history of scientific management.

Two writers of the same period were already less sure. Henri Fayol, a French mining executive, published his study of administration in a mining-industry bulletin in 1916. He used the word "principles" but said he meant it without any idea of rigidity. In his view nothing in administration is rigid or absolute, the same principle is almost never applied twice under identical conditions, and using the principles well is an art that takes judgment. It is an early, documented statement of the contingency instinct, though Fayol was offering a caution and not a theory. The full story of the book is in Henri Fayol and the principles of management.

In 1924 Mary Parker Follett published Creative Experience, a book about experience, law and social life rather than factory management. In it she argued for finding "the law of the situation in the situation" while still being guided by law and not by personal or national whims. She was writing about something wider than organizations, so this is a precursor to contingency thinking, not a statement of it. Nobody yet called any of this contingency theory, and nobody had measured anything.

What this means for teams today: Fayol's warning still applies to every best-practice playbook you buy. A principle is a starting hypothesis for your conditions, not a law.

The Field Studies (1950s-1961)

Essex factories and electronics firms break the one-best-way rule

The turning point came from fieldwork in British industry. Joan Woodward and her research team surveyed manufacturers in South-East Essex in the 1950s, according to a sociology dictionary entry. They classified production by technical complexity, from unit and small-batch production, through large-batch and mass production, to process production, and found that technology accounted for many of the differences in how firms were structured. Her long-term study of 100 organisations was published in 1965 as Industrial Organisation: Theory and Practice, and Imperial College records that she found firms performed best when their structures and processes suited the technology they used. The entry notes she was often accused, unjustly, of technological determinism.

At almost the same time, two other British researchers, Tom Burns and G. M. Stalker, studied how technical innovation affected electronics firms, an account summarized in a sociology dictionary entry. Their book, The Management of Innovation, was first published in 1961. It set out the now-famous split between mechanistic systems and organic systems. Mechanistic systems are hierarchical and tightly controlled and suit stable conditions. Organic systems redefine tasks continually and communicate sideways, and they suit changing markets and technology. The chapter's abstract states the point directly: effective management does not approximate to one ideal type, and the variation follows different rates of technical or market change.

Neither study used the word "contingency" as its headline. Both did something Taylor and Fayol had not: they went into the plants, compared firms, and let the structure vary with the situation.

What this means for teams today: Before you copy another company's org design, ask what that company makes and how fast its world changes. A stable operation and a fast-moving one need different structures.

The Year of Contingency (1962-1967)

Several research groups reach the same conclusion within five years

Researchers in different fields were reaching the same place. Alfred Chandler's Strategy and Structure (1962) came from business history. He examined administrative histories of close to a hundred large American companies, including the fifty with the largest assets in 1909 and seventy of the largest in 1948, and studied four pioneers of the multidivisional form in depth: du Pont, General Motors, Standard Oil (New Jersey) and Sears, Roebuck. His thesis, in his words, was that structure follows strategy. Du Pont and General Motors began to build their new structure shortly after World War I. Chandler was a historian, not a contingency theorist, but his finding supplied a second factor beside technology: the company's own strategy.

Then came Paul Lawrence and Jay Lorsch. Their comparative study of six organizations in one industrial environment appeared in Administrative Science Quarterly in June 1967 (volume 12, pages 1 to 47) and as the book Organization and Environment. A sociology dictionary entry describes the book as a study of ten firms in the plastics, food and container industries, finding that uncertainty in each firm's market, technical-economic and scientific sub-environments was strongly related to its internal organization. The more uncertain the environment, the more the departments differed from one another, and the stronger the mechanisms had to be to integrate them and resolve conflict. Their November 1967 Harvard Business Review article on the integrator described a new management role, the integrator, aimed at reconciling specialization with integration of effort.

The same year, James D. Thompson published Organizations in Action, a book Jay Galbraith later credited, with Herbert Simon's work, as a major influence on his own, as INSEAD Knowledge recounts. And Fred Fiedler, a psychologist, published A Theory of Leadership Effectiveness in 1967, after a 1954 study of high school basketball teams led him to the Least Preferred Coworker score. Fiedler's contribution was to apply the same logic to a person: the right leadership style depends on how much control the situation gives the leader. Our guide to the Fiedler contingency model walks through the model itself.

Contingency theory is a label for a cluster of findings, not one person's invention. Several groups landed on the same idea in the same few years.

What this means for teams today: Match your integration effort to your differentiation. If your sales, product and engineering groups work very differently, you need more explicit coordination, not less. The history of matrix and flat organizations shows what happens when firms get that balance wrong.

The Fit Years (1968-1980s)

Aston counts, Galbraith designs, Child pushes back

Once the idea had a name, researchers set out to measure it. The Aston group began in the 1960s in the Birmingham area of the UK, led by Derek Pugh, and its papers in Administrative Science Quarterly clustered the dimensions of structure in 1968 and, in 1969, examined how context shapes it. According to the Talking About Organizations summary, size turned out to be particularly important. The program counted structure across many organizations instead of arguing from single cases.

Jay Galbraith gave the field its design language. His 1973 book, Designing Complex Organizations, treated structure as a way to handle the information that uncertainty creates. His 1974 Interfaces paper, Organization Design: An Information Processing View, examined the link between task uncertainty and organizational form using Herbert Simon's cognitive limits theory. He later developed the Star Model of five levers: strategy, structure, process, people and rewards. He died in 2014, aged 75, per INSEAD.

The theory also drew a challenge from inside the Aston circle. John Child developed the idea of strategic choice, defined in Sage's encyclopedia entry on strategic choice as the process whereby power holders within organizations prepare and decide on courses of strategic action. The idea puts the decisions of people with power back into the picture, instead of treating structure as dictated by technology or environment alone.

What this means for teams today: Contingency tells you what fits, not what you must do. You can choose a different design and pay for the misfit, or change the conditions. Use the theory to see the cost of your choice.

The Quiet Standard (1990s-present)

The label fades while the habit spreads

Lex Donaldson's The Contingency Theory of Organizations (Sage, 2001) assessed the theory's foundations, evidence and methodological problems, and argued that it has a coherent core model while admitting weaknesses in past research. Its later chapters focus on "fit" and its relationship to performance.

The habit shows up elsewhere without the label. In November 2007, David Snowden and Mary Boone argued in Harvard Business Review that different contexts call for different approaches, the same "it depends" logic applied to decisions. Leadership training still teaches the idea in the form of situational leadership, and the two are not the same thing, as our comparison of contingency and situational leadership explains. The structures these researchers compared have their own record in the history of the organization chart, and the rule-bound form that Burns and Stalker called mechanistic has its roots in Max Weber's account of bureaucracy.

What this means for teams today: "It depends" is a respectable answer if you name what it depends on. Write down the two or three conditions that would make you change your structure, and review them each year.

Key People

Key Facts

Key Facts: Contingency Theory

• Fayol's study of administration, published in a mining-industry bulletin in 1916, treated management principles as flexible rather than absolute.
• Woodward's research on manufacturers found that firms performed best when structure matched technology, and her book appeared in 1965.
• Burns and Stalker's book was first published in 1961 and distinguishes mechanistic from organic systems.
• Chandler examined about a hundred large American companies and concluded that structure follows strategy.
• Lawrence and Lorsch's book studied ten firms in plastics, food and container industries.
• Fiedler's 1967 book followed a 1954 study of high school basketball teams that produced the LPC score.

The Pattern Behind the History

This is our synthesis of the record, not a research result. We call it the Fit-and-Choice Pattern, and it has four moves.

1. A universal rule gets tested in the field. Taylor's one best method met factories that did not behave alike.
2. Researchers find the variable. Technology, rate of change, uncertainty and situational control each explained part of the variation.
3. Fit becomes a design goal. Galbraith and the Aston group turned "it depends" into measured design choices.
4. Choice pushes back. Child's strategic choice reminded the field that people can reshape the conditions, not only adapt to them.

What It Teaches Teams Today

• Name your conditions. Technology, speed of change and uncertainty are the variables the early studies found. Write down where your team stands on each.
• Match structure to conditions, not to fashion. Stable, repeatable work suits clear rules. Fast-changing work suits looser, sideways communication.
• Budget for integration. The more specialized your departments become, the more coordination they need.
• Treat a best-practice playbook as a hypothesis. Fayol said the same in 1916.
• Remember you can choose. Fit has a cost when you ignore it, and sometimes you should change the conditions instead.