Great Post It Massacure

The Great Post-It Massacre Case Analysis

Description

Bob Scanlan had been working comfortably and competently under Beverly Sadowsky for many years. When George Fishman became the department boss, Bob started to have difficulties doing his day to day work. Bob had to turn to Beverly for help to smooth things out between George and himself. However, the situation had gotten worse that Bob was considering other position.

Diagnosis

George and Beverly had completely different management style. Beverly was very much hands-off and delegated heavily to Bob to run the small business account office. Yet George was a detail-focused control freak.

The conflicts between Bob and George stemmed from the gap between their expectation of how things should work and the existing office norms and environment. Neither Bob nor George had realized quickly enough that things need to be looked at and changes are required on both sides.

Theory

There are a lot of theories can apply to this case. First is the team theory. With the change of leadership of the department, effectively the team had been thrown back to the forming and storming stage from the earlier performing stage. At this stage conflicts are quite common.

A few traditional leadership theories can also be used to explain what happened here. The existing team under Beverly was capable and task-committed. According to the LMX mode, such team lends itself well to the follower based leadership. Beverly’s hands-off leading style worked well for the team. On the contrary, George’s directive management style was less effective for the team at that time.

The management contingency model calls for application of different management behaviors based on the favorableness of the environment. The most important variable in determining the favorableness is the relationship between the leader and members of the team. Clearly this was not very favorable for George. In the less than ideal but not extremely bad...