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

This study seeks to demonstrate the effectiveness of President Joe Biden’s leadership in the first year of his presidency in the context of the Contingency Theory proposed by Fred E. Fiedler (1967). This article argues that the effectiveness of Joe Biden’s leadership is contingent upon his relationship-based motivational system (high LPC score) and moderate power, control, and influence over American society. Specifically, the findings revealed that, while his relationship-oriented leadership style, which fell into Octant V of the 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 effectiveness operates through a coercive type of power, emotionalisation, and anticipatory action. This article aims to fill the gap in organisational studies on leadership effectiveness and presents a novel approach for examining variables in the model to account for the linguistic potential in the paradigm. It indicates the usefulness of the notions of the seven standards of textuality, speech acts, and coercion as a research apparatus supplementing the Contingency Model. The study also draws on correlational patterns identified in the analysis. The main results suggest a moderate positive correlation between the category of CC (cognitive coercion) and EC (emotive coercion), and strong positive correlations with the variables of struggle, threat, and praise. The analysis contributes to research on presidential rhetoric and, more specifically, the role of the president in managing crisis and adapting to change.