The contingency approach (sometimes called the situational approach) was developed by managers, consultants, and researchers who tired to apply the concepts of the major schools to real life situations. When methods highly effective in one situation failed to work in other situations, they sought an explanation. Why, for example, did an organizational development program work brilliantly in one situation and fall miserably in another? Advocates of the contingency approach had a logical answer to all such questions: Results differ because situations differ, a technique that works in one case will not necessarily work in all cases.
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