CASE Acme Manufacturing Company Steve Arnold is a production manager at Acme Manufacturing Company in New I ersey. When he arrived at the plant on Tuesday morning at 3:45. he was already late for work. Steve had overslept that morning because the night before he had stayed up late to nish the utonthly production report for his department. Entering the office Steve greeted his secre Lary, Ruth Sweeney, and asked whether anything urgent needed his immediate attention. Ruth reminded him of the staff meeting at 9:3!) with Steve's bossFrank Jones, the vice president for productionand the ether produetion managers. Steve thanked Ruth for reminding him [he had forgotten about the erecting} and continued on to his adjoining ofce to look for the email announcing the meeting. He vaguely remembered getting it a week earlier, but he did not read it carefully or look at the attached materials. His photte rang. and it was Sue Bradley, the sales vice president, who was inquiring about die states of a rush order for one of die company's important clients. Steve promised to Jook into the matter and get back to her later in the day with an answer. Steve had delegated the rush order last week to Lucy Pidtuns, one of his production supervisors, and he had not thought about it since then. Stepping back into the outer ofce, Steve asked Ruth if she had seen Lucy today. Ruth reminded him that Lucy was at a training workshop in California and would be difcult to reach until the session ended late in the afternoon, because the workshop facilitators regard cell phone caiIs and text messages as an unnecessaryr distraction. Going back into his ofce, Steve sent a test message to Lucy asking her to call him as soon as possible. Then. he resumed his search for the email about the meeting with his boss and the other production managers. He found it in his large collection of unprocessed emails, and it said the purpose of the meeting was to discuss a proposal for changing the qualitycontrol procedures. By now it was 9:25. and there was no time to read the proposal. He hun-ied out to get to the meeting on time. During the meeting, the other production managers participated in the discussion and made helpful comments or suggestions. Steve was not prepared for the meet ing and did not contribute much except to say that he did not anticipate any problems with the proposed changes. The meeting ended at l:3. and Steve returned to his ofce, where he found Paul Chen, one of his production supervisors, waiting for him. Paul wanted to discuss a problem caused in the production schedules by a major equipment breakdown. Steve called lfilenda Brown, his assistant manager. and asked her to join them to help rearrange the production schedules for the next few days. Glenda came in shortly and the three of them worked on the production sched- ules. They nished around noon and went out for lunch. Soon after returning from lunch, his boss [Frank Jones} stopped in to ask about the qual- ity repm't for last week. Steve explained that he had given top priority to nishing the monthly Production report and would do the quality report neitt. Frank was irritated, because he needed the quality data to finalize his proposal for new procedures, and he thought Steve understood this task was more urgent than the production report. He told Steve to get the quality data to him as soon as possible and left. Steve immediately called Glenda Brown and asked her to bring the qualityr data to his eiee. The task of reviewing the data and preparing a short summary was not diEhcult. but it took longer than he anticipated. It was 2:4D by the time Steve completed the rcpert and attached it to an email to his boss. Tl} Chapter 3 '- The Leadership Situation and Adaptive Leadership Looking at his calendar, Steve noticed that he was alreadyr late for a 2:311} meeting of the plant safety committee. The committee meets weekly to review safety problems, and each dcparnncnt sends a representative. Steve rushed out to the meeting, which was held in another part of the plant. The meeting was dull this week. without an}; important issues or problems to discuss. The meeting ended at 3:3D, and when Steve unmuted his cell phone he discovered that Lucy had tried to contact him before leaving to fly home from the conference. Steve walked back through his section of the plant and stopped to talk to his assistant manager Glenda She wanted some advice on how to resolve a problem in the production assignments for the neat day. and they discussed the problem for about shelfhour. When Steve renamed to his office at 4:05. he was feeling tired and decided it was time to go home. As he drove out of the parking lot, Steve reected that he was getting further behind in his work and wondered what he could do to get better control over his job. Written by Gary Yukl Questions 1. Whm specic things did Steve d instance? 2. What should Steve do to become more effective as a manager?I a wrong, and what should have been done in each