The David Fletcher Case

The David Fletcher case analysis highlights numerous problems that can occur within an organization when it fails to fulfill its primary responsibilities to employees. In this case, one major issue was that David Fletcher was unable to manage conflicts within his work team. He was more concerned with the overall business succeeding rather than the success of the team. We suggest that these problems were primarily due to Fletcher’s weak leadership, the lack of interpersonal skills between the employees, and the self-interests of the characters. His mind-set on managing interpersonal relationships was misguided; he underestimated the importance of a cohesive, interpersonal team. We are recommending that management should address these problems with proper communication and higher performance standards, to prevent future interpersonal conflict.

This section argues that the lack of team cohesion at Jenkins, Fletcher Partners derived from three sources: 1) weak leadership, 2) weak interpersonal skills and 3) self-interest within the team. We arrived at these conclusions by applying the transactional leadership theory to David’s weak leadership, the participative theory to his weak interpersonal skills and the transformational leadership theory to the self-interest issues of the team. Our discussion is organized by addressing each issue and providing evidence for the conflicts that occurred throughout the case study.

The first issue addressed is Fletcher’s weak leadership. As a manager, Fletcher was in charge of his team; however, he lacked the leadership qualities to resolve problems in a successful manner. The transactional leadership theory suggests that the leader should have the power to reinforce team members into successfully completing a task (Thompson 270). David failed to set guidelines for his team members, which resulted in the lack of concentration and motivation in the team and the ultimate disbanding of the group. David was more of a...