MT140 Unit 6 Leadership Style Analysis Example

Promoted Over Seven Former Peers: A Unit 6 Leadership Style Analysis in a Portrait Lab

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

MT140: Introduction to Management

Unit 6 Leadership Style Analysis

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

Larkspur School Portraits, the lab lead, the retouchers and every figure are composite and illustrative; the sources cited are real.

The Team and the Problem

The lab at Larkspur School Portraits retouches and color-corrects every image before packages print. In the fall it handles about 6,000 images a day. Last spring, Kendra, a retoucher with eight years at the company, was promoted to lab production lead over the seven retouchers she had worked beside. Two are newer than she is, three have similar experience, and two have been at the company longer. By the end of her first October, the backlog of images waiting for retouching had grown from about one day to almost three, and two schools received their packages late.

The Current Style

Three behaviors describe Kendra's approach. First, she assigns every school's images to a retoucher each morning on a whiteboard, without asking who is closest to finishing or who knows a school's lighting. Second, she checks a sample of every retoucher's images herself before they go to print, including those of the two senior retouchers. Third, when a retoucher questions an assignment, she answers that the decision is made.

Taken together, these behaviors fit a directive or autocratic style, in which the leader makes decisions alone and closely supervises the work. Lewin et al. (1939), in their early experiments with boys' clubs, compared autocratic, democratic and laissez-faire leadership and found that autocratic groups often produced as much work as democratic ones while the leader was present, but with more hostility and less work when the leader left. Kendra's approach keeps the lab moving when she is at the whiteboard, and slows it whenever she is reviewing.

Two Alternatives

A participative style would involve the retouchers in decisions about how work is divided. Each morning, the team would spend ten minutes agreeing which schools each person takes, drawing on what each retoucher knows. The veterans, for example, know which schools have difficult gym lighting and which photographers tend to underexpose.

A situational approach, based on the Hersey and Blanchard model, asks the leader to adjust how much direction and support she gives according to how ready each person is for the task at hand (Hersey et al., 2013). Readiness combines ability and willingness. The two newer retouchers would get a telling style: clear instructions and close checking. The three peers of similar experience would get a participating style, sharing decisions. The two senior retouchers, highly able and willing, would get a delegating style: they would choose their own schools and review their own work.

Comparing the Styles

On speed, the directive style is slowest in October, because every assignment and every review passes through one person who also retouches. The participative style is faster but adds a daily meeting. The situational style is fastest, because it removes Kendra's review of the two senior retouchers entirely and reduces it for the three peers, freeing several hours a day.

On quality, the directive style protects the work of the two newest retouchers, which is its real strength. The participative style risks uneven quality if decisions are shared with people still learning. The situational style keeps close review where it is needed.

On the team's response, the directive style is the most damaging for this team in particular. Being checked like new hires by a former peer is hard for the two senior retouchers to accept. Both have asked about transferring to the photography side.

The directive style also costs Kendra herself. She still retouches the hardest schools, because she is the best retoucher in the lab, and she now does it in the evenings after spending the day assigning and reviewing. In three conversations with her, she described the review step as the part of the job she cannot give up, because a bad batch reaching a principal would be her fault now. That fear is understandable for a new lead, and it explains the style better than any wish to control people does. It also means the style is a response to the promotion rather than a settled way of leading, which makes it easier to change.

Her own account also suggests what support she needs. Nobody trained her for the lead role; she was promoted in April and running the lab alone by August. A short conversation with the owner about which errors the lab can tolerate would remove some of the fear driving her reviews.

Thompson and Vecchio (2009) tested versions of situational leadership theory and found limited support for its predictions in general, although their data did suggest that people new to a job respond well to a clearer, more structured hand. That caution matters: the model is not a formula. But its central point, that one style does not fit seven people with different experience, describes this lab well.

Each style also sends a message about the promotion itself. Under the directive style, the message is that Kendra's new title changed how she sees her former peers. Under the participative style, the message is that the team still decides together, which may blur her authority on the days a hard call is needed. Under the situational style, the message is more precise: she trusts people according to what they have shown, which is how she was treated when she was a retoucher. The two senior retouchers trained her when she joined, and a style that recognizes that history is likely to settle the team faster than one that ignores it.

Kendra checks the work of the two people who taught her to retouch as if they had started last week.

Recommendation

Kendra should adopt a situational approach, with a participative element for the daily assignment. In practice, she would let the two senior retouchers choose their schools and review their own work, assign the three peers through a short morning conversation, and continue to direct and review the two newest retouchers closely. She would then use the hours saved on review to retouch the most difficult schools herself.

The measures are the backlog in days, which should return to about one day within three weeks, and whether the two senior retouchers withdraw their transfer requests. The risk is that the senior retouchers make errors she no longer catches; a weekly spot check of five images each would limit it without returning to full review.

References

Hersey, P., Blanchard, K. H., & Johnson, D. E. (2013). Management of organizational behavior: Leading human resources (10th ed.). Pearson.

Lewin, K., Lippitt, R., & White, R. K. (1939). Patterns of aggressive behavior in experimentally created "social climates." The Journal of Social Psychology, 10(2), 269-299. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.1939.9713366

Thompson, G., & Vecchio, R. P. (2009). Situational leadership theory: A test of three versions. The Leadership Quarterly, 20(5), 837-848. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2009.06.014