D253 Task 1 Values-Based Leadership Decision Example

Choosing How a Night Shift Ends: Applying a Values-Based Leadership Framework to a 34-Role Reduction

[Candidate Name]

School of Business, Western Governors University

D253 Values-Based Leadership

Task 1 Performance Assessment

[Course Instructor]

August 11, 2026

Model document written by our desk. The company, the people and the figures are composites built for teaching; no real employer, colleague or employee is described.

The Decision and the Values It Put in Conflict

Cedar Ridge Instruments is a composite manufacturer of laboratory balances and calibration equipment, with 210 employees at a single plant and $58 million in annual revenue at a 6.2 percent operating margin. Its night shift, 34 roles, runs at 61 percent of the output standard the day shift holds, and labor cost per finished assembly is $41.80 at night against $33.10 on days. As a newly appointed director of operations I was asked for a recommendation inside 30 days: move night production to a contract manufacturer, or wind the shift down inside the plant. Both paths end the night shift. The decision in front of me was about how it ended, not whether.

Option A closes the shift in 30 days and moves the work outside. It saves $1.42 million a year, carries about $96,000 of one-time cost for accrued leave and recruiting, and puts 34 people out of work with the pay they had already earned and nothing beyond it, since a reduction of 34 at a site of 210 does not reach the federal notice threshold (U.S. Department of Labor, n.d.). Option B winds the shift down over five months, issues 60 days of written notice, redeploys 19 of the 34 into open day-shift and field-service roles, and separates 15 with one month of pay for every year of service.

Option B costs $612,000 in one-time money: $298,500 of severance, $84,000 of retraining, and $229,500 of overlapping labor while both shifts run. Set against Option A that is $516,000 more, and it delays the full annual saving by five months. Those are the figures that made this a values decision rather than a spreadsheet decision. My own scored value inventory put benevolence and security above achievement and power, while the measure I am judged on, plant conversion cost, rewards achievement. Schwartz (2012) predicts that tension directly, because benevolence and achievement sit on opposing sides of the value circle and cannot both be served fully by one act.

Two facts kept this from being a private matter of conscience. First, 176 people stay in the plant after the night shift ends, and they will read how the 34 were treated as a statement of what this company does when money is tight; Brown, Trevino and Harrison (2005) call that the moral manager half of ethical leadership, where what a leader is seen to do carries further than what a leader says. Second, nine of the 34 hold calibration certifications that take 14 months of supervised hours to earn, and the day shift is already two short. The people at risk were also the capability at risk.

Applying a Values Framework to the Choice

Kraemer (2011) frames values-based leadership as four practices, and the first, self-reflection, produced the actual question. I wrote down what I wanted this decision to say about Cedar Ridge three years from now, and the answer was not 'we hit the number.' It was that this company does not treat 30 days of notice as an acceptable way to end a ten-year working relationship when it can afford 60. Writing it down mattered, because it turned a feeling into a standard I could be held to, and a chief financial officer can argue with a standard in a way that no one can argue with a feeling.

The second practice, balance and perspective, meant hearing the positions before forming one. The controller's case was that $516,000 of avoidable cost at a 6.2 percent operating margin needs $8.3 million of new revenue to replace, which is true and was not waved away. The night-shift lead's case was that six of her people had moved to nights to cover childcare and would take a day opening immediately. The quality manager raised the one figure nobody had costed: replacing a certified calibration technician runs about $27,000 and takes 14 months before the replacement can sign off work. Three positions, three different denominators, and only one of them appeared in the original proposal.

The third practice, true self-confidence, is the willingness to say plainly what I did not know. I could not show that the contract manufacturer would hold a tolerance of plus or minus 0.02 grams at volume, because its audit report covered a different product family, so I wrote that down instead of presenting the saving in Option A as certain. The fourth practice, genuine humility, is the discipline of remembering that I ran a night shift myself for two years and would have wanted the 60 days. Humility here is not self-deprecation; it is refusing to make a decision about people that I would not accept if it were made about me.

Kouzes and Posner (2017) argue that a leader has to find a personal voice and then affirm the values a group already shares, and the second half is where most values statements fail. Cedar Ridge posts 'we finish what we start' on the plant floor, and the line is quoted with some pride. That gave the wind-down a shared basis rather than a personal one, because finishing an open backlog inside the plant is what this company already claims it does. A framework decides nothing on its own. What these four practices did was force the conflict into the open, price it, and set the choice against a standard the company had already published.

The Action Taken, Its Cost, and How It Will Be Judged

I recommended Option B and the executive team approved it. The night shift ends five months from the announcement date. Written notice went to all 34 on the same morning, 60 days ahead of the first separation, which is 60 days more than federal rules require at a site of this size. Nineteen people accepted redeployment into day-shift and field-service roles, 15 separated with one month of pay for each year of service, and all nine certified technicians stayed. The announcement was made in person on the shift floor at the start of the run, not by email at the end of a Friday, so people heard it from someone who had to stand there afterward.

The defense is not that the choice was kind. The added $516,000 buys three things a spreadsheet can price. It keeps nine calibration certifications in the building, each worth about $27,000 to replace and 14 months before a new hire can sign off work. It protects delivery on an open backlog of $3.9 million that Option A would have moved to an audited but untested supplier. The same annual saving of $1.42 million then recovers the difference in 4.4 months, after which the two options are financially identical and only one of them leaves 176 people watching. Cost avoided in one quarter is not the same as value created.

Two requests were refused. The chief financial officer asked whether notice could wait until the quarter closed, which would have kept the reported number tidy and cut the warning from 60 days to 38; the answer was no, because a value that survives only until it is inconvenient is a preference, which is the distance Trevino and Nelson (2021) draw between an espoused value and an enacted one. A supervisor asked to tell his own crew early, and since that would have been refused for anyone else it was refused for him. None of this repairs the underlying fact: the shift ended and 15 people lost work they wanted to keep.

A decision defended on values still has to be checked against outcomes, so three measures were set before the announcement went out. Voluntary turnover on the day shift, which ran 11 percent over the prior twelve months, is tracked monthly for a year, and a rise above 15 percent would say the plant read this differently than intended. On-time delivery against the $3.9 million backlog is tracked to the end of the wind-down with a floor of 96 percent. The 19 redeployments are reviewed at 6 and 12 months, because a redeployment that quietly ends in a resignation has only moved the same loss into a softer column.

References

Brown, M. E., Trevino, L. K., & Harrison, D. A. (2005). Ethical leadership: A social learning perspective for construct development and testing. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 97(2), 117-134.

Kouzes, J. M., & Posner, B. Z. (2017). The leadership challenge: How to make extraordinary things happen in organizations (6th ed.). Wiley.

Kraemer, H. M. J., Jr. (2011). From values to action: The four principles of values-based leadership. Jossey-Bass.

Schwartz, S. H. (2012). An overview of the Schwartz theory of basic values. Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, 2(1), 1-20.

Trevino, L. K., & Nelson, K. A. (2021). Managing business ethics: Straight talk about how to do it right (8th ed.). Wiley.

U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration. (n.d.). Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act. Retrieved August 11, 2026, from https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/layoffs/warn