LDR 711A Week 4 Relational Leadership and Followership Example

The Station Manager Who Never Called Back: Leader-Member Exchange and Followership Across an Airport's Partner Network

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

LDR/711A: Leadership Theory and Practice

Week 4 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

Cascade Valley Regional Airport, its partners and its staff are composites written for a model paper.

The first three weeks studied the invented Cascade Valley airport through one long night of ice. Skills explained differences among managers, and the normative decision model explained why a directive style worked on the airfield but failed in the terminal. Both analyses pointed toward relationships. The airline that issued conflicting passenger information was led locally by a station manager who had started two months earlier, had never met director of operations Marisol Vega and did not join the airport's coordination calls during the storm. Meanwhile, the communications center manager's strong relationship with another airline's station manager prevented a similar problem. This paper examines relational leadership and followership and applies them to relationships inside and around the airport.

Leader-Member Exchange

The exchange view starts from a plain observation: a leader does not relate to every follower the same way. Some pairings grow into partnerships marked by trust and willingness to go beyond the job, while others remain limited to what the job description requires.

Antecedents and Consequences

Dulebohn et al. (2012) conducted a meta-analysis of the antecedents and consequences of leader-member exchange. Follower characteristics, such as competence, conscientiousness and positive affect; leader characteristics, such as contingent reward behavior, transformational leadership and leader expectations; and interpersonal variables, such as perceived similarity, affect, trust and assertiveness, predicted exchange quality. High-quality exchange was associated with better job performance, organizational citizenship behavior, satisfaction, commitment and lower turnover intentions.

Followership Theory

Uhl-Bien et al. (2014) reviewed followership research and defined followership theory as the study of the nature and impact of followers and following in the leadership process. They distinguished a role-based view, which examines how followers' characteristics and behaviors influence leaders and outcomes, from a constructionist view, which sees leadership as co-created through interactions in which people claim and grant leader and follower identities. They argued that followers are not merely recipients of leadership but participants who shape it.

How Followers Construct Their Role

Carsten et al. (2010) interviewed employees about how they understood following. Some held passive orientations, believing followers should defer to leaders and wait for direction. Others held active orientations, offering opinions when asked. Still others were proactive, challenging leaders, taking initiative and seeing themselves as partners in leadership. Context, including leaders' styles and organizational climate, shaped which orientation followers adopted.

Relationships With Direct Reports

Marisol's relationships with her five managers vary. With the airfield and maintenance managers, exchange is high quality, built over years of shared winters, with mutual trust and frequent informal contact. With the terminal operations manager, new to the role, exchange is more formal. The meta-analysis by Dulebohn et al. (2012) helps explain this: perceived similarity and shared experience favored the airfield managers, a pattern that could create an in-group.

Relationships Across Organizations

Exchange theory was developed within organizations, but the same dynamics apply to relationships with partners who are not followers in a formal sense. Marisol has high-quality relationships with the control tower manager and two long-serving airline station managers, built through monthly operations meetings and occasional coffee. She has no relationship with the newest station manager. During the storm, information flowed through the strong relationships and failed through the missing one.

The airport's emergency plan described who was in charge, but the storm revealed that information moved along friendships.

Follower Orientations Among Staff

Interviews with supervisors suggest varied follower orientations. Snow crew supervisors are proactive: they adjusted plans on their own during the storm and told Marisol when her sequencing could be improved. Some terminal staff are passive, waiting for instructions that never came while passengers grew frustrated. Carsten et al. (2010) suggest that leaders' styles shape these orientations; years of directive leadership in the terminal may have encouraged passivity.

Followers Shaping the Storm Response

From a constructionist view, leadership during the storm was co-created. A ground handler who organized cots and blankets for families claimed a leadership role and was granted it by travelers and coworkers. A concession manager who stayed open after others closed acted as a proactive partner. These acts of leadership came from people with no formal authority.

How the Strong Relationships Were Built

The high-quality relationships at Cascade Valley were not accidental. Marisol's tie with the control tower manager grew from a joint review of a runway incursion years earlier, when they worked through the problem together without blaming each other. Her ties with the two long-serving station managers grew from a decade of monthly breakfasts and from small favors, such as finding an extra gate during a mechanical delay. These histories match the antecedents in the meta-analysis: trust, liking and a sense of mutual obligation developed over repeated interactions.

Why the Newest Relationship Never Formed

The newest station manager arrived during the busy holiday season, and no one at the airport took responsibility for welcoming him. His company had trained him to escalate decisions to its regional operations center, so he saw the airport as a landlord rather than a partner. Without early contact, he had no reason to trust the airport's information over his own company's, which is exactly what happened during the storm.

Fairness Concerns

Differentiated relationships can seem unfair. The terminal manager noticed that the airfield managers had easier access to Marisol and felt excluded. Leaders can reduce this by offering every follower opportunities for high-quality exchange, such as regular one-on-one meetings.

Building Relationships Before Crises

The analysis suggests several actions. Marisol will meet every new airline station manager in person within their first two weeks and invite them to a monthly operations breakfast. A partner directory with personal mobile numbers will be maintained. She will hold monthly one-on-one meetings with each direct report, including the terminal manager, focused on development.

Encouraging Proactive Followership

To move terminal staff from passive to proactive orientations, supervisors will be trained to invite initiative during irregular operations, and staff who take sensible initiative will be recognized. The emergency plan will explicitly authorize frontline staff to act on passenger care without waiting for approval.

What Partners Said About the Airport

Interviews with three airline station managers revealed how partners experience the airport's leadership. The two long-serving managers described Marisol as someone who listens and keeps her word. The newest manager said he had received emails from the airport but had never been asked what his airline needed. All three said they would follow the airport's lead in a crisis if they trusted the information and had been part of planning. Their comments suggest that partners are willing followers when relationships exist and that leadership across organizations is earned through contact before it is needed.

Implications for Theory

The airport case suggests that leader-member exchange concepts extend usefully to interorganizational relationships, where formal authority is absent and exchange quality depends almost entirely on trust and shared experience. This is a question worth further study.

Conclusion

Relational approaches locate leadership in relationships and followership research shows that followers shape and co-create leadership. At Cascade Valley, relationships of differing quality, inside and across organizations, determined how information flowed during the storm, and follower orientations shaped who took initiative. Building relationships before crises and encouraging proactive followership address the failures that formal plans missed.

References

Carsten, M. K., Uhl-Bien, M., West, B. J., Patera, J. L., & McGregor, R. (2010). Exploring social constructions of followership: A qualitative study. The Leadership Quarterly, 21(3), 543-562. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2010.03.015

Dulebohn, J. H., Bommer, W. H., Liden, R. C., Brouer, R. L., & Ferris, G. R. (2012). A meta-analysis of antecedents and consequences of leader-member exchange: Integrating the past with an eye toward the future. Journal of Management, 38(6), 1715-1759. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206311415280

Uhl-Bien, M., Riggio, R. E., Lowe, K. B., & Carsten, M. K. (2014). Followership theory: A review and research agenda. The Leadership Quarterly, 25(1), 83-104. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2013.11.007