C203 Task 2 Leadership Theory Application Example

Opening Night With Half a Crew of Veterans and Half Who Have Never Worked a Line: Evaluating Situational, Transformational and Servant Leadership Against My Own Style and Applying Them to a New Restaurant Opening

Student Name

School of Business, Western Governors University

C203: Becoming an Effective Leader, Task 2

Course Instructor

Month Day, Year

Opening Night With Half a Crew of Veterans and Half Who Have Never Worked a Line: Evaluating Situational, Transformational and Servant Leadership Against My Own Style and Applying Them to a New Restaurant Opening

The Situation

In the spring, Harbor Table, the fictionally named casual dining group where I am regional operations manager, opened its seventh restaurant in a suburb where we had no presence. The opening team had 64 employees. About half were transfers from our other locations, experienced servers and cooks who knew our systems; the other half were new hires, many in their first restaurant job. The general manager, Andre, was newly promoted. I was responsible for the opening. My leadership profile had shown that I am decisive and results-driven but weak at listening and at developing others. This paper evaluates three leadership theories, places my own style among them and applies them to the opening.

Situational Leadership

Situational leadership theory proposes that no single style works for everyone. Leaders should adjust how much direction and how much support they give according to each follower's readiness, meaning their competence and commitment for a specific task. A new employee with enthusiasm but little skill needs clear direction; a skilled but discouraged employee needs support; a skilled and committed employee needs little of either and can be delegated to. The theory is intuitive and widely used in training, which is its main strength. Its weakness is evidence. A test of three versions of the theory found limited support, with the clearest evidence that less experienced employees benefit from more structure and direction (Thompson & Vecchio, 2009). The theory is therefore most useful as a reminder to diagnose each person before deciding how to lead them.

Transformational Leadership

Transformational leaders inspire followers to commit to a shared vision, act as role models, challenge followers to think for themselves and attend to each person's development. A meta-analysis found that transformational leadership was strongly related to follower satisfaction, motivation and rated leader effectiveness, and that contingent reward, a transactional behavior of rewarding performance, was also strongly related to these outcomes (Judge & Piccolo, 2004). The theory's strength is its evidence and its focus on commitment beyond compliance. Its weakness for my situation is that it says less about the practical question of how much direction a new cook needs on a Friday night.

Servant Leadership

Servant leadership asks leaders to put followers' growth and well-being first, on the premise that people who are served will serve the organization and its customers. Across two decades of studies, servant leadership has been linked to higher trust, engagement and helping behavior among followers, and that it explained outcomes beyond transformational leadership (Eva et al., 2019). Its strength is its moral clarity and its emphasis on development, which my profile identified as my weakest area. Its weakness is that it can be hard to apply under time pressure, when serving everyone's needs competes with getting food out.

Where My Own Style Fits

Honestly assessed, my natural style is transactional with a directive bent. I set targets, reward results and tell people what to do. In situational terms, I default to high direction for everyone, which suits new hires but frustrates experienced people, and I rarely delegate. I show some transformational behaviors, especially acting as a role model on the floor, but little intellectual stimulation or individualized consideration. Servant leadership is the furthest from how I usually operate, and the closest to what my feedback says I need.

Applying the Theories to the Opening

Situational leadership shaped how I organized the team. Instead of running one training plan for all 64 people, I asked Andre and the kitchen manager to sort employees by readiness for their specific stations. New hires received detailed station guides, shadow shifts and a trainer assigned to each of them for two weeks, which is high direction and high support. Experienced transfers were asked to lead training for their stations, which is delegation. For the first time, I resisted directing experienced people and let them decide how to train.

Transformational leadership shaped how we built commitment. At the preopening meeting, rather than reviewing targets, I talked about why the restaurant mattered: it was our first in a new community and the first management job for a manager many of them knew. I asked the transfers to act as role models and asked every employee, in small groups, what would make this location better than the ones they had worked in. Several ideas, including a shared break room schedule, were adopted before opening.

Servant leadership shaped my own role. During opening week, instead of running the floor myself, I asked Andre each night what he needed and supplied it, whether that was an extra dishwasher, a conversation with a difficult supplier or simply staying out of the way. When a new line cook, overwhelmed on the first Saturday, walked off the line, my instinct was to replace her. Instead, Andre and I met with her the next day, learned she had never been trained on the grill station she was assigned, and moved her to prep with a plan to retrain. She is still with us.

Results and Lessons

The opening met its sales target in the first month, and 90-day turnover among new hires was 18%, compared with 35% at our last opening. I cannot attribute that entirely to leadership, but the pattern fits the theories: new employees who received direction and support stayed, and experienced employees who were trusted to lead took ownership. The lesson for me is that my directive default is right for some people some of the time, and wrong as a single approach. The theories together gave me a way to decide when to direct, when to inspire and when to step back and serve.

Conclusion

Situational leadership helped me match direction to each person's readiness, transformational leadership helped build commitment to a new restaurant, and servant leadership changed my own role from running the opening to supporting the manager who would run it after I left. Each theory has limits, but applying them together to a real situation showed me how to move beyond the style that comes naturally to me.

References

Eva, N., Robin, M., Sendjaya, S., van Dierendonck, D., & Liden, R. C. (2019). Servant leadership: A systematic review and call for future research. The Leadership Quarterly, 30(1), 111-132. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2018.07.004

Judge, T. A., & Piccolo, R. F. (2004). Transformational and transactional leadership: A meta-analytic test of their relative validity. Journal of Applied Psychology, 89(5), 755-768. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.89.5.755

Thompson, G., & Vecchio, R. P. (2009). Situational leadership theory: A test of three versions. The Leadership Quarterly, 20(5), 837-848. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2009.06.014