GM586 Unit 8 Destructive Leadership Analysis Example

Three Hundred Closings by December: A Unit 8 Destructive Leadership Analysis of a Home Builder's Division President

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

GM586: Transformational Leadership

Unit 8 Destructive Leadership Analysis

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The home builder, its division, the president and every figure are composite and illustrative; the research cited is real.

The Case

The builder is a family-owned company with three divisions. Its fastest-growing division, in a growing metro area, built about 180 homes a year when a new division president arrived. Over the next three years he raised closings to nearly 300. Here is what the record shows.

The promise. In his first all-hands meeting he set a target of 300 closings by December of his third year and called it "a promise to 300 families." Superintendents were told that a missed closing date was a broken promise to a family.

The model home. During the final quarter of each year, he slept in a model home on the busiest site for several nights, which superintendents described with admiration.

Challenging the sequence. He told superintendents that waiting for every inspection before moving on was "a habit worth challenging," and asked them to find ways to keep trades moving.

Personal attention. He met weekly with his favored superintendents, learned their families' names and gave them larger bonuses. Others received little of his time.

The consequences appear in company and county records. In the third year, 41 homes had walls closed with drywall before the framing inspection was completed, which the county discovered when an inspector found a closed wall on a scheduled visit. Each required drywall removal, reinspection and repair. Warranty claims in the division tripled within eighteen months of the third-year closings, mostly for framing, plumbing and electrical defects behind walls. When a superintendent emailed the family owners about the inspection problem, he was reassigned within a month to a remote subdivision of twelve lots, which everyone understood as punishment.

Four Admired Behaviors, Turned

Each of the president's behaviors resembles a transformational behavior from the full range model (Bass & Riggio, 2006). The promise to families was inspirational motivation: a vivid goal tied to a purpose people cared about. Sleeping in the model home was a display of personal sacrifice, which superintendents saw as idealized influence. Asking them to challenge the inspection sequence was framed as intellectual stimulation. His weekly attention to favored superintendents looked like individualized consideration.

But each was turned. The inspiring goal was used to make a missed date feel like a moral failure, which pressured superintendents to close walls early. The sacrifice made it hard to question him. The challenge was aimed at a safety rule rather than an inefficient habit. And the personal attention was selective, creating an inner group whose loyalty depended on his favor.

Every behavior the course teaches as transformational appears in this case, and each was used to push people past a rule that existed to protect families.

Placing the President on the Two Axes

Ståle Einarsen, Merethe Aasland and Anders Skogstad define destructive leadership along two axes: behavior toward subordinates, from supportive to harmful, and behavior toward the organization, from serving its interests to undermining them (Einarsen et al., 2007). Their model yields four types. Leaders who serve the organization but harm subordinates are tyrannical. Leaders who harm both are derailed.

In his first two years, the president fits the tyrannical type. He served the organization's growth goal, but harmed subordinates by pressuring them to break rules and punishing the one who reported it. By the end of his third year, as warranty costs arrived and the county increased its inspections of the division's sites, he had moved toward the derailed type, because the same behavior was now costing the company money and its reputation with the county. The warranty bill for the third-year homes reached about $2.6 million, more than the division's profit on the additional closings.

The Toxic Triangle

Art Padilla, Robert Hogan and Robert Kaiser argue that harm of this kind needs three things at once, which they draw as the corners of a triangle: the leader, the people who follow, and the setting around them (Padilla et al., 2007).

The leader. The president showed what Padilla and colleagues describe as charisma and a personalized need for power. His promise and his sacrifice drew people in, and his response to the reporting superintendent shows he used power to protect himself rather than the company.

Susceptible followers. Padilla and colleagues separate two kinds of follower: conformers, whose compliance comes from fear or unmet personal needs, and colluders, who actively advance the leader's agenda because they share it and profit from it. The favored superintendents, who received larger bonuses, behaved as colluders. Other superintendents and the trades, many on short-term contracts, behaved as conformers.

A conducive environment. The housing market was rising fast, and buyers were waiting. The family owners judged divisions mainly by closings and rarely visited sites. The company had no independent quality function and no confidential channel for reporting problems. The reporting superintendent had to email the owners directly, and they forwarded his email to the president.

What Allowed It

The environment did the most to allow the harm. Barbara Krasikova, Stephen Green and James LeBreton argue that destructive leadership often goes unchecked when organizations reward the outcomes it produces in the short term (Krasikova et al., 2013). The family owners praised the division's growth for two years and saw the warranty costs only in the third. A quality inspector reporting to the owners, not to the president, and a confidential channel for safety concerns would have exposed the closed walls in the first year.

Three changes would close the triangle's third side. First, a quality manager reporting to the owners should sign off on every closed wall, with the county inspection record attached, before drywall is ordered for the next house. Second, the company should create a confidential reporting line, staffed outside the divisions, with a written rule that no one who reports a safety or code problem can be reassigned for a year without the owners' review. Third, the owners should judge each division on warranty claims per home and on inspection failures alongside closings, so that a division president cannot hit the closings number while building the warranty bill. None of these changes requires a different president, though they would make it much harder for any president to repeat this one's pattern.

The analysis also suggests why transformational behaviors are not enough. A leader can display all four and still cause harm if the purpose behind them is personal or if an organization measures only what the leader wants measured.

References

Bass, B. M., & Riggio, R. E. (2006). Transformational leadership (2nd ed.). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Einarsen, S., Aasland, M. S., & Skogstad, A. (2007). Destructive leadership behaviour: A definition and conceptual model. The Leadership Quarterly, 18(3), 207-216. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2007.03.002

Krasikova, D. V., Green, S. G., & LeBreton, J. M. (2013). Destructive leadership: A theoretical review, integration, and future research agenda. Journal of Management, 39(5), 1308-1338. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206312471388

Padilla, A., Hogan, R., & Kaiser, R. B. (2007). The toxic triangle: Destructive leaders, susceptible followers, and conducive environments. The Leadership Quarterly, 18(3), 176-194. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2007.03.001