4 readings
12 (pp. 401-411)
1 (pp. 8-13)


SW - barrett - top ranked woman @ sw
herb -other half of the brain - maverick


CASE I
You are general foreman in charge of a large gang laying an oil pipeline. It is now necessary to estimate your expected rate of progress in order to schedule material deliveries to the next field site.
You know the nature of the terrain you will be traveling and have the historical data needed to compute the mean and variance in the rate of speed over that type of terrain. Given these two variables, it is a simple matter to calculate the earliest and latest times at which materials and support facilities will be needed at the next site. It is important that your estimate be reasonably accurate. Underestimates result in idle foremen and workers, and an overestimate results in tying up materials for a period of time before they are to be used.
Progress has been good, and your five foremen and other members of the gang stand to receive substantial bonuses if the project is completed ahead of schedule.
CASE II
You are supervising the work of 12 engineers. Their formal training and work experience are very similar, permitting you to use them interchangeably on projects. Yesterday your manager informed you that a request had been received from an overseas affiliate for four engineers to go abroad on extended loan for a period of six to eight months. For a number of reasons, he argued and you agreed that this request should be met from your group.
All your engineers are capable of handling this assignment, and from the standpoint of present and future projects there is no particular reason why any one should be retained over any other. The problem is somewhat complicated by the fact that the overseas assignment is in what is generally regarded in the company as an undesirable location.
CASE III
You are the head of a staff unit reporting to the vice-president of finance. He has asked you to provide a report on the firm’s current portfolio, which will include recommendations for changes in the selection criteria currently employed. Doubts have been raised about the efficiency of the existing system in the current market conditions, and there is considerable dissatisfaction with prevailing rates of return.
You plan to write the report, but at the moment you are quite perplexed about the approach to take. Your own specialty is the bond market, and it is clear to you that a detailed knowledge of the equity market, which you lack, would greatly enhance the value of the report. Fortunately, four members of your staff are specialists in different segments of the equity market. Together, they possess a vast amount of knowledge about the intricacies of investment. However, they seldom agree on the best way to achieve anything when it comes to the stock market. Although they are obviously conscientious as well as knowledgeable they have major differences when it comes to investment philosophy and strategy.
You have six weeks before the report is due. You hove already begun to familiarize yourself with the firm’s current portfolio and have been provided by management with a specific set of constraints that any portfolio must satisfy. Your immediate problem is to come up with some alternatives to the firm’s present practices and select the most promising for detailed analysis in your report.
CASE IV
You are on the division manager’s staff and work on a wide variety of problems of both an administrative and technical nature. You have been given the assignment of developing a universal method to be used in each of the five plants in the division for manually reading equipment registers, recording the readings, and transmitting the scorings to a centralized information system. All plants are located in a relatively small geographical region.
Until now, there has been a high error rate in the reading and/or transmittal of the data. Some locations have considerably higher error rates than others, and the methods used to record and transmit the data vary between plants. It is probable, therefore, that part of the error variance is a function of specific local conditions rather than anything else, and this will complicate the establishment of any system common to all plants. You have the Information on error rates but no Information on the local practices that generate these errors or on the local conditions that necessitate the different practices.
Everyone would benefit from an improvement in the quality of the data as they are used in a number of important decisions. Your contacts with the plants are through the quality-control supervisors who are responsible for collecting the data. They are a conscientious group committed to doing their jobs well, but are highly sensitive to interference on the part of higher management in their own operations. Any solution that does not receive the active support of the various plant supervisors is unlikely to reduce the
error rate significantly.




Putting the Vroom and Yetton Model to Work

An Example:

The best way to understand this leadership model is to apply it to a specific decision that a given leader needs to make and then follow through on the decision tree shown in Figure 12.3. Amy Cantos is the head of the accounting department in the business school of a large Midwestern state university. There are six secretaries in the department and twenty-four professors. Cantos has to assign each secretary to work for four professors. Some of the secretaries are more skilled than others, and some of the professors have heavier workloads than others, so these assignments are more complicated than they seem at first. Should Cantos make these assignments herself, or should she allow her subordinates (the secretaries and the professors) to participate in the decision-making process?
Using the decision tree shown in Figure 12.3, Cantos first asks herself question A: “Is there a quality requirement such that one solution is likely to be more rational than another?” Cantos answers yes to this question because it is important for the workload to be spread as evenly as possible among the secretaries and for professors who have heavy workloads and a lot of deadlines to have the most skilled secretaries.
Moving along on the “yes” path from question A lead to questions B: “Do I have sufficient information to make a high-quality decision?” Cantos answers yes to question B because she is familiar with the skill levels of the six secretaries and with the workloads and deadlines faced by each of the twenty-four professors.
Moving along the “yes” path from question B leads to question D: “Is acceptance of decision by subordinates critical to effective implementation?” Cantos answers yes to question D because it is important that both secretaries and the professors accept the secretarial assignments.
Moving along the “yes” path from question D leads to question E: “If I were to make the decision by myself, is it reasonably certain that it would be accepted by my subordinates?” Cantos answers yes to question E because she has a good working relationship with the secretaries and the professors and she knows that all of her subordinates believe she does what is best for the department.
Moving along on the “yes” path from question E leads to question F: “Do subordinates share the organizational goals to be attained in solving this problem?” Cantos answers no to this question because the secretaries’ goals are to work for the professors who are easiest to get along with, but most of the professors (regardless of their workloads) have the goal of getting one of the most skilled secretaries.
Moving along the “no” path from question F leads to the number 5, which indicates that this is a number 5-type problem. Because Cantos’s decision is a group rather than an individual decision, four decision styles could be appropriate for this problem. The first style in the feasible set is consultative, has the most involvement by subordinates, and is good for their growth and development. Because Cantos needs to make a quick decision and doesn’t want to waste the secretaries’ or the professors’ time, she chooses the first style in the set, AI.


 
 
GROUP PROBLEMS AND DECISIONS
 
INDIVIDUAL PROBLEMS AND DECISIONS



AI.
Leader solves the problem or makes the decision using information available at the time. No outside output. Least Participative.
AI.
Leader solves the problem or makes the decision using information available at the time. No outside output.

AII.
The leader obtains the necessary information form subordinates. The leader makes the decision.
AII.
The leader obtains the necessary information form subordinates involved in the decision. The leader makes the decision.

CI.
The leader shares the problem with the relevant subordinates individually and gets their ideas and suggestions without bringing them together as a group. The leader makes the decision
CI.
The leader share the problem with the subordinates and asks for their ideas and suggestions. The leader makes the decision

CII.
The leader share the problem with subordinates as a group, obtaining their ideas and suggestions. The leader makes the decision.
GI.
The leader share the problem with the subordinate, and together they analyze the problem and arrive at a mutually agreeable solution.
SHAPE \* MERGEFORMAT
GII.
The leader share the problem with subordinates as a group, does not try to influence the group, and is willing to accept and implement any solution that has the support of the entire group.
DI.
The leader delegates the problem to the subordinates, provides any relevant information, but gives the subordinate responsibility for solving the problems. - most participative