Jennifer Vas used to work at Zenich Solutions, and joined Trigen Solutions in March as a programmer. Jennifer was career oriented. Zenich Solutions is a relatively small company. She enjoyed working at Zenich, but she believed that it was Trigen which could provide her more opportunities because it was a bigger company and she might get a chance to work on international projects as well. She was sure about doing her best in the new company, just like she had proven herself in her old job.

Jennifer got promoted as a senior programmer with a good hike at Trigen. There was a chance of her to be sent to the UK for a project.

During the orientation sessions, she met Alan whom she was supposed to directly report to. Alan and his other colleagues gave a warm welcome to her for joining their team. She introduced herself and exchanged numbers.

Out of curiosity, to know more about her boss, she asked Ankita, one of her new colleagues. Ankita answered, ‘Alan did not interfere with their work. He tries to avoid interrupting, during their work schedules’. Jennifer was surprised to hear this.

At Zenich, Jennifer reported to Vaibhav and had looked up to him whenever she wanted guidance. Vaibhav made sure that Jennifer always learned from experiences and always encouraged to bring new ideas to the table. She remembered telling her colleagues at Zenich that an ideal boss is one who does not interfere with their subordinate’s work.

Jennifer believed that even Alan seemed to be of non-interfering type. During her first week in a new role in the office, she found the atmosphere to be dull, but she was also excited. Her team was assigned a new project. While working on the project, she was facing few hurdles with the new software. She tried hard to solve the problem and tried to come up with several possible solutions. She then thought of asking for help from Alan and his team by mentioning all the possible solutions that she tried. She started daydreaming about all the praise that she would be getting for the effort put into the project. Next morning, when Alan walked into the office, Jennifer was ready to get into his cabin. Alan asked Jennifer to come into the cabin after 10 minutes.

When she went inside the cabin, Alan was completely blank and asked Jennifer to introduce her. Jennifer introduced herself. Later he asked, ‘Why did you want to meet me?’ Jennifer replied by mentioning about the problems she was facing. But before she could even finish, he told her that he has got a busy schedule and so he would send an email with the solution to be implemented by the team. Jennifer was disheartened. She came out of the cabin and went to her team members to brainstorm. She discussed all the solutions that she could think of and waited for others to suggest ideas. Nobody was interested. After a few minutes, Rakesh, one of her colleagues, replied, ‘there is no point in discussing because Alan would give the best solution and we will have to do whatever he says’.
Jennifer was disappointed. As time passed by, Jennifer realized that Alan was completely opposite to her previous boss.
Gradually, she started losing interest in her work and was not at all learning new things. She felt that her career was going nowhere. Her performance was going nowhere.
Questions
1. According to you, what are the reasons for disappointment for Jennifer? Answer the question using Maslow’s theory.
2. How does the team leader or a manager play a role in an employee’s performance?
3. What should Jennifer do in order to solve the situation?