CARUSOS INEFFECTIVENESS Carla Caruso is an entrepreneur who has started her own interior decorating business. Caruso is a highly competent and creative interior decorator with established relationships with most of the major home builders in her community. She used to work on her own as an independent contractor. Because of a dramatic increase in the number of new homes being built, she became swamped with requests for her services and decided to start her own company. She hired a secretary/book-keeper and four highly competent interior decorators; two of which were male, and all were 8-10 years younger than her. Caruso still does decorating jobs herself and has adopted a hands-off approach to leading the four decorators who report to her because she feels that interior design is a very personal creative endeavour. Rather than pay the decorators on some kind of commission basis (such as a percentage of their customers total billings), she pays them a premium salary higher than average so that they are motivated to do whats best for a customers needs and not what will result in higher billings and commissions. Caruso thought everything was going smoothly until customer complaints started coming in. These complaints ranged from the decorators being hard to get a hold of, promising unrealistic delivery times, and being late for or failing to keep appointments, to actually being impatient and rude when customers had a hard time making up their minds. Caruso knows that her decorators are very competent and is concerned that she must not be effectively leading and managing them. She wonders, in particular, if her hands-off approach is to blame and if she should change the manner in which she rewards or pays her decorators. She has hired human resource consultants to help her with this problem. 1. (a) Using evidence from the case to support your response, identify and explain two (2) leadership traits (discussed in your course) that can be associated with Carla. (8 marks)