Analysis of John Terrill Leadership: DGL case Study

Introduction

In order to effectively influence the followers in any specific situation, the leader needs to adopt the most suitable approach and style of leadership which is well aligned with the given situational context. While the contemporary organizations and business environment is becoming more complex, the leaders are also required to be more flexible in their approach. The underlying report is focused on analysis of DGL case, whereby technical division of company is completely showing low productivity, in spite of having best qualified and highest paid engineers. John Terrill was appointed as the head of the division and current report has critically investigated his style of leadership along with source of power being used by him to influence his followers. The identification of issues in the his leadership style has served as the way of making recommendations regarding changes needed in leadership style of Terrill to make it more effective for enhancing productivity of Technical division of DGL. 

Issues identified in leadership style of Terrill

Investigation of Terrill’s leadership has highlighted that he presented limited focus on enhancement and implementation of task structures. As indicated in the case, Terrill has organized meeting with engineers to assure them off their welfare and made an effort to assert the right of engineers in front of senior management. To maintain good relationship with engineers in his technical team, he made a trade off with task structure consolidation. Under the tenant of behavioral theories of leadership, the focus of Terrill was on people oriented behavior while remaining completely ignorant of task oriented behavior (Santoso et al., 2020). So, he did not focus on providing task related guidance and creating shared work responsibilities for engineers to enhance performance of the division. His lack of concern towards task behavior might further lower the commitment of employees, thus leading to even severe performance and productivity issues in Technical division of DGL (Meier, 2016). Likewise, it could also lead to ambiguous task goals formation and conflict generation among other issues. 

Leadership style of Terrill

The leadership style of Terrill can be viewed through the lens of situational leadership theory, which has four different styles of leadership, characterized by two key variables; task behavior and relationship behavior (Thompson and Glasø, 2018; Hersey, Blanchard and Natemeyer, 1979). These four styles are; directing (low directive and low support), coaching (high directive and high support), supporting (low directive and high support) and delegating (high directive and low support) (Santoso et al., 2020). In the light of this theory, Terrill’s leadership style can be best described as supportive leadership style, whereby Terrill is more supportive and less directive towards the engineers in his team. The justification of his leadership style can be given by considering the readiness level of his followers (engineers). In the Technical department of DGL, engineers have enjoyed possess high level of job readiness as they are receiving highest salary that is backed by very good qualification level. This information shows that engineers had high working competence, as they possess needed level of knowledge, skills as well as experience to work effectively on their respective job positions. The second factor which defines readiness of engineers is their willingness and commitment to perform. In case of engineers’ of Technical team, they had to spend high time of writing reports which has substantially lowered their morale and willingness to perform. These evidences clearly indicate that development level of engineers was best suited to D3 (Henkel and Bourdeau, 2018). In D3 level of employee development, they have moderate to high level of competence and low level of commitment, which is indicated in case of engineers of Technical division of DGL (Meier, 2016).