Acme Airlines Case Study

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Acme Airlines: The Opportunity in Change
“Without change there is no innovation, creativity, or incentive for improvement. Those who initiate change will have a better opportunity to manage the change that is inevitable.” William Pollard’s, a 20th century physicist, words show us the power of being proactive, and igniting change to strengthen a company’s productive climate (Sellers, Boone, Harper, 2011). Acme Airlines flight attendants lacked incentive to improve the quality of their work, as a result of distrustful management and overall frustration within the company. Acme took successful steps to rebuild their FA program into a more relationship oriented work environment. Through an understanding of effective leadership, we will use the …show more content…

Cultivating a strong team comes from casting by individual strengths; providing a strength based approach to the work compared to a deficiency approach. “The LMX model focuses on the unique relationship-based exchange between a leader and followers (Nahavandi, 2015).” True diversity comes from the subtle differences between individuals. A competent LMX leader will be able to tailor their real life experiences to their leadership style, incorporating a high level of respect, deeper trust, and continually growing relationships with followers (Nahavandi, 2015). Essentially, Acme Airlines is asking managers to create “in-groups” for the flight attendants to build trust and emotional bonds (Nahavandi, 2015). Nahavandi (2015) cautions from selecting in-group members based on personal relationships, instead focusing on creating a workable team. In-group responsibilities might be to specific domiciles or perhaps to training and building relationships with new flight attendants. Effective in-groups of flight attendants would meet a wide variety of needs for all flight attendants as well as keep membership fluid (Nahavandi, 2015). For Acme Airlines to continue to be proactive in their leadership, deepening the experience of in-groups to become leaders provides more connection to the work; giving individuals more purpose. If two in-group members were tasked with creating their own in-group, there …show more content…

Delegating leadership responsibilities to in-groups poses a challenge of building a strong structure with a clear understanding of procedure. On the other side, if the leader cuts followers out of the decision making process, the newly formed relationships will suffer. The Normative Decision Model offers a recommendation for the ways leaders “adjust their decision style depending on the degree to which the quality of the decision is important and the likelihood that employees will accept the decision (Nahavandi, 2015).” An easy first step for leaders is to understand how many people will be effected by the decision (Nahavandi, 2015). Does it only concern an individual or is the whole group going to be impacted? Using the decision tree on page 76 of Nahavandi’s The Art and Science of Leadership (2015), leaders can effectively identify the appropriate decision style needed. A leader must adopt an autocratic style when the quality of the decision is not significant, when employees disagree, and when the employees don’t see eye to eye with the organizations goals (Nahavandi, 2015). While a consultative style is necessary when the employees will hold the responsibility of implementation; especially when employees agree with the overall goals of the organization (Nahavandi, 2015). Finally, “group oriented decision style should be used when the leader does not have all the information, and

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