Case Study for Assessment 2 Requirements

When DGL International, a manufacturer of refinery equipment, brought John Terrill to manage its services division, company executives informed him of the urgent situation. Technical services, with 20 engineers, was the highest-paid, best-educated and least productive division in the company. The instructions to Terrill: turn it around. Terrill called a meeting of the engineers. He showed great concern for their personal welfare and asked point-blank: ‘What’s the problem? Why can’t we produce? Why does this division have such turnover?’ Without hesitation, employees launched a hail of complaints, ‘I was hired as an engineer, not a pencil pusher’, and ‘We spend over half our time writing asinine reports in triplicate for top management, and no one reads the reports’. After a two-hour discussion, Terrill concluded he had to get top management off the engineers’ backs. He promised the engineers, ‘My job is to stay out of your way so you can do your work, and I’ll try to keep top management off your backs, too’. He called for the day’s reports and issued an order effective immediately that the originals be turned in daily to his office rather than mailed to headquarters. For three weeks, technical reports piled up on his desk. By month’s end, the stack was nearly a metre high. During that time no one called for the reports. When other managers entered his office and saw the stack, they usually asked, ‘What’s all this?’ Terrill answered: ‘Technical reports’. No one asked to read them. Finally, at month’s end, a secretary from finance called and asked for the monthly travel and expense report, Terrill responded, ‘Meet me in the president’s office tomorrow morning’. The next morning the engineers cheered as Terrill walked through the department pushing a cart loaded with the enormous stack of reports. They knew the showdown had come. Terrill entered the CEO’s office and placed the stack of reports on his desk. The CEO and the other senior executives looked bewildered. ‘This’, Terrill announced ‘is the reason for the lack of productivity in the technical services division. These are the reports you people require every month. The fact that they sat on my desk all month shows that no one reads this material. I suggest that the engineers’ time could be used in a more productive manner’. The CEO and the senior executives admit that there has been a process error. However, they are not entirely convinced on how Terrill attempted to resolve it. The company brings in you as an organizational leadership consultant to assess the current issues and provide a report with recommendations to resolve matters related to leadership and team development. Refer to the assessment instruction document for detailed instruction.

Solution:

1           Introduction

In order to effectively influence the followers in any specific situation, the leader needs to adopt the most suitable approach and leadership style which is well aligned with the given situational context. While the contemporary organizations and business environment is becoming more complex, the leaders are also required to be more flexible in their approach. The underlying report is focused on analysis of DGL case, whereby technical division of company is completely showing low productivity, in spite of having best qualified and highest paid engineers. John Terrill was appointed as the head of the division and current report has critically investigated his leadership style along with source of power being used by him to influence his followers. The identification of issues in the his leadership style has served as the way of making recommendations regarding changes needed in leadership style of Terrill to make it more effective for enhancing productivity of Technical division of DGL.

2           Issues identified in the leadership style of Terrill

Investigation of Terrill’s leadership qualities has highlighted that he presented limited focus on enhancement and implementation of task structures. As indicated in the case, Terrill has organized meeting with engineers to assure them off their welfare and made an effort to assert the right of engineers in front of senior management. To maintain good relationship with engineers in his technical team, he made a trade off with task structure consolidation. Under the tenant of behavioral theories of leadership skills, the focus of Terrill was on people oriented behavior while remaining completely ignorant of task oriented behavior (Santoso et al., 2020). So, he did not focus on providing task related guidance and creating shared work responsibilities for engineers to enhance performance of the division. His lack of concern towards task behavior might further lower the commitment of employees, thus leading to even severe performance and productivity issues in Technical division of DGL (Meier, 2016). Likewise, it could also lead to ambiguous task goals formation and conflict generation among other issues.

3           Leadership style of Terrill

The leadership style of Terrill can be viewed through the lens of situational leadership theory, which has four different styles of leadership, characterized by two key variables; task behavior and relationship behavior (Thompson and Glasø, 2018; Hersey, Blanchard and Natemeyer, 1979). These four styles are; directing (low directive and low support), coaching (high directive and high support), supporting (low directive and high support) and delegating (high directive and low support) (Santoso et al., 2020). In the light of this theory, Terrill’s leadership style can be best described as supportive leadership style, whereby Terrill is more supportive and less directive towards the engineers in his team. The justification of his leadership style can be given by considering the readiness level of his followers (engineers). In the Technical department of DGL, engineers have enjoyed possess high level of job readiness as they are receiving highest salary that is backed by very good qualification level. This information shows that engineers had high working competence, as they possess needed level of knowledge, skills as well as experience to work effectively on their respective job positions. The second factor which defines readiness of engineers is their willingness and commitment to perform. In case of engineers’ of Technical team, they had to spend high time of writing reports which has substantially lowered their morale and willingness to perform. These evidences clearly indicate that development level of engineers was best suited to D3 (Henkel and Bourdeau, 2018). In D3 level of employee development, they have moderate to high level of competence and low level of commitment, which is indicated in case of engineers of Technical division of DGL (Meier, 2016).

It has been indicated from the model of situational leadership that when employees are highly competent and able to perform their task appropriately yet have low level of readiness, then they need high support from leaders (Cote, 2017; Zigarmi and Roberts, 2017). As indicated from case, Terrill has maintained high focus on creating conditions for employees through which their willingness to perform can increase. For instance, Terrill has called meeting to provide opportunity to engineers for giving their views on factors which are hindering their performance. The employees were free to provide their suggestions regarding work and Terrill has assured to support them in their work.  It shows that Terrill was highly inclined towards relationship development with engineers. On the other hand, he has focused less on directing them and invested little time and energy in guiding the staff on task related activities. As shown by case information, “My job is to stay out of your way so you can do your work, and I’ll try to keep top management off your backs, too”. It clearly shows that he has not focused on task structure development and has not implemented any procedures to guide employees on their work activities. Therefore, it can be concluded that John Terrill has adopted supportive leadership style, while being highly supportive and less directive.

On the other hand, it is witness able from the case information that he even assured his followers that he will take top management off their backs, such that they can work with greater autonomy and discretion. The leader whose influence is derived from relationship, rather than formal authority is recognized as interactive leader (Wright, 2017). Here, John Terrill has also acted as an interactive leader and he has tried to create conditions whereby his followers can collaborate with him on the issues experienced by them. It is noticeable that Terrill tried to be empathetic from the start and never tried to coerce any of his engineers to improve productivity by all means. Rather he acted as their support system and assured them that they will be provided with the working environment which is desired by them to work efficiently.

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