GM503 Unit 2 Ballpark Turnaround Relational Analysis Example

Who Filled the Stands: A Unit 2 Relational Framework Analysis of a Minor-League Attendance Turnaround

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

GM503: Leadership Theory and Practice II

Unit 2 Relational Framework Analysis

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The club, its staff and every figure are composite and illustrative; the frameworks and studies cited are real.

The Story as Told

The club plays Double-A baseball in a city of about 250,000. Average attendance fell for five straight seasons to about 3,100 a game. Over the four seasons after a new general manager arrived, it rose to about 5,400, the largest increase in its league. Two newspaper profiles and the club's own press release credited him by name, describing a "turnaround architect" who "reinvented the ballpark experience." My own account, written for an earlier course, said much the same.

Why the Credit Came So Easily

James Meindl and his colleagues called this the romance of leadership: people attribute outcomes to leaders far more readily than the evidence warrants, especially when results are unusually good or bad and causes are hard to see. In their studies, interest in leadership rose and fell with organizational performance, and observers credited leaders for outcomes that other factors could explain (Meindl et al., 1985). Jeffrey Pfeffer made a related argument earlier: leaders are constrained by circumstances and by the people around them, and attributing outcomes to them is often a way of making sense of events rather than an accurate account of causes (Pfeffer, 1977).

A general manager is the most visible person in a minor-league front office. When attendance rose, he was the obvious explanation.

A Relational Approach

Mary Uhl-Bien's relational leadership theory treats leadership as a social process that emerges in the interactions among people, not as a trait or behavior of one person. The questions it asks are where direction and coordination actually formed and through which relationships (Uhl-Bien, 2006). To apply it, I reconstructed the origin of the seven decisions most often cited as causes of the turnaround, using meeting notes, email, the ticketing system's records and interviews with five current and former staff.

Tracing the Seven Decisions

Thursday dollar nights began when the group sales manager and the concessions director, eating lunch together, realized that weeknight crowds were too thin to cover concession staffing. They proposed discounted concessions on the slowest night, and the general manager approved it at the next staff meeting. Thursday attendance roughly doubled within a season.

The kids' run-the-bases program was suggested by a seasonal usher, a retired teacher, in an end-of-season survey. The community relations coordinator picked it up and ran it the following year.

Dynamic ticket pricing came from the ticketing manager, who had seen it at a conference and spent a winter testing it in the club's system. The general manager supported the rollout but did not originate it.

The rebuilt group sales program formed in a series of conversations between the group sales manager and two former players who worked in the community office, who knew which youth leagues and churches had once filled the ballpark and had stopped coming.

The new mascot and promotions schedule came from the general manager himself, who brought the idea from his previous club and championed it.

The beer garden in the left-field corner was designed by the concessions director and the head groundskeeper, who found a way to use an unused berm without blocking sightlines.

The local hiring of game-day staff, replacing an outside contractor, was proposed by the operations manager after complaints about rude staff, and the general manager negotiated the contract exit.

Of the seven decisions the press credited to the general manager, he originated one; the other six formed in relationships among staff he had hired, kept or simply let work together.

Checking the Account Against the Ticket Data

If the turnaround came mainly from staff-originated decisions, the attendance gains should cluster where those decisions applied. The ticketing system allows a rough test. Of the roughly 2,300 additional fans per game over four seasons, about 900 came on Thursdays, where the dollar-night program operates, and about 700 came through group sales, which the rebuilt program handles. Dynamic pricing raised average ticket revenue but changed attendance little. The mascot and promotions schedule, the general manager's own idea, coincided with gains on Saturday nights of about 300 fans a game. These figures cannot isolate causes, since several changes overlapped, but they are consistent with the relational account: the largest gains appear where staff-originated programs run, and the general manager's own initiative accounts for a real but smaller share.

Mapping the Relationships

Figure 1 maps the people involved in each decision. Three relationships recur. The group sales manager and the concessions director appear in two decisions. The community office's former players link to group sales. And the ticketing manager connects to almost every revenue decision because every promotion runs through the ticketing system. The general manager appears in all seven, but in six as an approver or supporter rather than an originator.

What the General Manager Actually Did

The relational reading does not erase the general manager. He did three things that mattered. He replaced a practice of weekly reports to the owner with a weekly staff meeting where any department could propose an idea. He kept the group sales manager and the concessions director, both of whom his predecessor had considered letting go. And he approved six proposals that cost money in a year when the owner wanted budget cuts. Those are contributions to the conditions in which leadership formed, not authorship of the decisions themselves.

What the Relational View Adds and What It Misses

The relational view corrects the story told in the press, which assigned to one person what many people produced. It also explains why the turnaround might not survive the general manager's departure: if the key relationships remain, it may not depend on him at all. But the relational view can underweight structural decisions that only someone with authority could make, such as approving spending against the owner's wishes. A complete account needs both the relationships and the authority that protected them.

Conclusion

The attendance turnaround was credited to the new general manager in the way Meindl's romance of leadership predicts. Traced to its origins, six of the seven decisions behind it formed in relationships among staff, and one came from him. His real contributions were creating a forum where ideas could surface, keeping the people who produced them and approving their proposals. The turnaround was led, but not in the way the profiles described.

References

Meindl, J. R., Ehrlich, S. B., & Dukerich, J. M. (1985). The romance of leadership. Administrative Science Quarterly, 30(1), 78-102. https://doi.org/10.2307/2392813

Pfeffer, J. (1977). The ambiguity of leadership. Academy of Management Review, 2(1), 104-112. https://doi.org/10.2307/257611

Uhl-Bien, M. (2006). Relational leadership theory: Exploring the social processes of leadership and organizing. The Leadership Quarterly, 17(6), 654-676. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2006.10.007