Imagine that you are working at an external HR consulting firm that provides subject matter experts and advice to a client's organization. This year, your company has a new client, Yelp, one of the largest companies for local search and review. Your roles and responsibilities are to analyze Yelp's New York office and provide the best consulting service to them. As an external consultant, you don't have much knowledge about this company. Therefore, you need to be strategic in terms of gathering enough information to understand the problems that this office faces. Given this background information, you will solve Part A and B.

After you successfully resolve the sales team's problems, you are assigned to analyze the IT team of Yelp's NY office. While you are talking to a team of software engineers, you learn that the team suffers from a toxic leader and poor team dynamics. Below are two major pieces of information about the leader, Daniel, that you have gathered from his direct reports. Daniel has a great understanding of business and technical matters, which enables him to assume a leadership position. However, his technical brilliance becomes a weakness as a leader. He is overly confident and arrogant while not having a good people skill. One direct report says, "Daniel has great expertise in sales and trading, which I admire of. However, because of that, he try to micromanage every task that I am responsible for, and he wants to make all the decisions by himself. This makes me frustrated and I feel lack of control over my work." Daniel plays favorites: Nobody really knows why he likes certain people in his team, but it seems clear that he shows favoritism toward particular direct reports but does not care at all about the rest of direct reports. One direct report says "One day, when I asked for advice, Daniel told me that 'I don't give a shit about you. Go figure it out yourself.' Not so surprising because I already know he doesn't like me." Another direct report says "I hate to admit this but yeah... Daniel actually likes me and gives me easier tasks. So, it is kinda awkward to work with other colleagues who are out of his sight."

1) What are the major issues of this team? a. This is not a repeat of the background information provided above. Instead, analyze that information to identify what Organizational Behavior concepts (e.g., leadership and team issues) are occurring in these stories and how they are interacting with each other. b. why do you think it is important to address these issues 2) What leadership theories can explain Daniel's poor leadership? a. Choose at least two leadership theories that are most appropriate to explain his leadership style. Describe each leadership theory i. There are no specific correct answers here - you can choose any 2 leadership theories you want.

ii. Be sure to define any terms you use in a way that would make sense to an average person (e.g. don't assume your reader knows what "Trait theory" is). b. Then, explain why each theory can explain Daniel's leadership style. i. Be sure to describe how Daniel's specific behaviors can be explained by the chosen theories. 3) What within-team processes do you expect this team would have (e.g., low team cohesion)? Choose at least one behavioral team process and one cognitive/affective team process. Describe each team process (give an example!) and explain why you think this team may have such team processes. a. There are no specific correct answers here - you can choose any 2 team processes we discussed. Just describe how that process will manifest in this specific team (i.e. if you expect it to be high, medium, low, give an example of what that might be). b. Be sure to define any terms you use in a way that would make sense to an average person (e.g. don't assume your reader knows what "team cognition" is). c. Be sure to 4) What are two recommendations that can resolve these problems? a. Again, there are no specific correct answers here - think creatively on how you might address these issues.