PSYCH 668 Week 1 Leadership and Management Example

A New President With Better Systems and Fewer Followers: Leadership Versus Management at a Produce Distributor

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

PSYCH/668: Organizational Development, Leadership, and Management

Week 1 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The distributor, its people and all figures are composites written for a model paper; theories and research come from the sources listed.

Our company is doing many things better and keeping fewer people. Trucks leave on time, inventory losses are down and costs are lower than they were two years ago, yet the warehouse has become a revolving door. This paper uses the distinction between leadership and management to explain how both can be true.

The Organization

I am a human resources generalist at a family-owned produce distributor in Tolleson, Arizona, with about 280 employees, most of them warehouse pickers, loaders and drivers who move fruit and vegetables from growers to grocery stores and restaurants across the Southwest. The founder ran the company for thirty-one years, knew most employees by name and made decisions largely by instinct. When he retired two years ago, his son-in-law, Greg, a former logistics analyst, became president.

What Changed

Greg introduced route-planning software, weekly scorecards for every department, a new attendance policy with points for late arrivals and a budget process that required supervisors to justify overtime. On-time delivery rose from 88 to 96 percent and spoilage fell by a third. Over the same period, annual turnover among pickers rose from 38 to 61 percent, and exit interviews kept repeating a few phrases: "nobody tells us why," "it's all numbers now" and "they changed everything at once."

Two Kinds of Work

Kotter (1990) argued that leadership and management are distinct but complementary systems of action. In his account, management is about coping with complexity, which it does by setting targets and budgets, arranging jobs and hiring for them and then watching results and fixing deviations, all of which bring order to large operations. Leadership is about coping with change: setting a direction, aligning people behind it and motivating and inspiring them to keep moving when obstacles appear. Kotter rejected the idea that leading belongs to a gifted few, and he thought most companies had plenty of control and too little direction.

Read through Kotter's lens, Greg has done the managing half exceptionally well. The software, scorecards and budget reviews are planning and control at their best. What our pickers describe is the missing other half: they were never told where the company is going, why the changes matter or how their own work fits, and no one tried to bring them along.

Two Temperaments

Zaleznik (2004) pushed further, proposing that the two roles attract people who think and value differently. In his essay, managers prize order, see work as a process of coordinating people and compromise to keep conflict low, while leaders shape ideas, take risks and relate to people with more emotional intensity. He worried that organizations reward the managerial temperament and quietly discourage the other.

Greg fits Zaleznik's managerial picture closely. He is calm, careful and uncomfortable with emotional conversations, and he talks about the warehouse in terms of rates and exceptions. I do not think his temperament is a flaw; it is the reason our routes now work. But it explains why change was announced by memo and why supervisors who asked about morale were shown a turnover chart.

A Leader Without a Title

The clearest leadership in our building belongs to someone with no authority at all. Teresa, a night-shift lead who has worked at the company for fourteen years, has kept turnover on her crew below twenty percent while day shift churned. She explains each new policy in her own words before the shift starts, translates scorecard numbers into what they mean for the crew's week, takes complaints to the warehouse manager and comes back with answers, even when the answer is no. When the points-based attendance policy began, she helped two single parents arrange schedules that would keep them under the limit.

Teresa holds no budget and signs no schedules, yet her crew follows her through every change Greg makes.

Where the Roles Overlap

Yukl (1989) reviewed decades of research on managerial leadership and cautioned against treating leaders and managers as different kinds of people. Studies of what managers actually do show that effective ones both plan and motivate, both monitor and inspire, and that influence comes from relationships and expertise as well as formal position. Yukl argued that the useful question is which leadership behaviors managers use and with what effect, not whether someone is a leader or a manager.

That caution matters for my recommendation. It would be easy to cast Greg as a mere manager and Teresa as a true leader, but Teresa also manages: she tracks every picker's rate and quietly fixes scheduling gaps. And Greg has led once before, when he persuaded the founder to invest in the software. The question is not who Greg is but which functions he has neglected and how to cover them.

What the Distinction Explains

Both functions serve different goals. Management delivered the organizational goals Greg was hired to reach: reliability, lower costs and fewer losses. The team goals on the warehouse floor, such as keeping experienced pickers, learning new systems without burnout and trusting that hard work will be noticed, depended on leadership functions that no one with authority performed. Turnover is expensive, at roughly four thousand dollars in recruiting and training per picker, so the leadership gap is now eroding the savings that management produced.

What I Will Recommend

I plan to propose three changes to Greg and the warehouse manager. First, the next change, a move to voice-directed picking, should start with a short explanation, in person, of why it matters for the company and for pickers, before any memo. Second, leads like Teresa should be formally included in rollout planning, with a small stipend, so the people who already carry leadership have a voice. Third, Greg should hold monthly half-hour meetings on each shift, not to present scorecards but to answer questions, a modest start for someone who prefers data to conversation.

How Greg Sees It

When I shared an early draft of this analysis with Greg, he did not argue with the turnover figures. He said he had assumed that clear numbers would speak for themselves and that explaining every change would slow the company down at a time when routes were failing. He also said, with some frustration, that he had held two all-hands meetings and few people asked questions. Night shift, he noted, never attended because the meetings were held at ten in the morning, which itself shows how a management decision about timing quietly shut out the crew most willing to engage.

Limits of the Analysis

The leadership versus management distinction explains a great deal here, but not everything. Wages in nearby warehouses rose during the same period, and some turnover would have occurred regardless. A fuller analysis would compare exit reasons before and after Greg's arrival and examine whether turnover differed by supervisor, which I plan to request.

Conclusion

Greg brought management our company needed, and the delivery numbers prove it. What the company lacks is leadership from those with authority: direction people understand, alignment that includes the floor and attention to how change feels. The distinction gives us a vocabulary for that gap and points toward people, like Teresa, who already fill part of it.

References

Kotter, J. P. (1990). What leaders really do. Harvard Business Review, 68(3), 103-111.

Yukl, G. (1989). Managerial leadership: A review of theory and research. Journal of Management, 15(2), 251-289. https://doi.org/10.1177/014920638901500207

Zaleznik, A. (2004). Managers and leaders: Are they different? Harvard Business Review, 82(1), 74-81.