Question:

Identify and describe the various stakeholders at DSS.

Examine Chris Patersons main source of power and how it had affected her sphere of influence as one of the leaders at DSS.

Using Fiedlers contingency theory, evaluate the appropriateness of Chris Petersons leadership behaviour.

Chris Peterson at DSS Consulting Deborah Ancona and David Caldwell Late Thursday afternoon, Chris Peterson was reflecting on the meeting she would have tomorrow with her boss, Meg Cooke. The purpose of the meeting was to give Meg an update on the status of the integrated budget and planning system her team had been working on over the last six months and plans for the team to begin marketing this system and other new DSS consulting services to clients. Overall, Chris was quite pleased with the work her team had done. The team had been formed as part of a strategic change, including a somewhat controversial re-organization at DSS. The changes and new structure had created dissatisfaction and a fair amount of anxiety among many of DSS's consultants, but Chris felt her team had overcome their concerns to become a very effective group. They had worked together well, avoided the conflicts that often plague these kinds of teams, and generally maintained a high level of motivation and satisfaction. Most of all, Chris was proud of the work her team had done. They had created a budget and planning system that the team believed would be embraced by DSS's clients. The team had not gotten much support from other groups at DSS in developing the system, so team members had done much of the technical work on their own that would have normally been done by support people in the company. Despite this, Chris was very pleased with the system and looked forward to sharing her team's accomplishments with Meg. DSS Consulting DSS Consulting was formed in 1997 to provide administrative support to small school districts primarily in the mid-west and mountain west. The company was founded by three retired school district administrators to help small school districts that had limited staff deal with difficult and somewhat specialized administrative problems, such as negotiating labor agreements or setting up procurement systems. During the late 1990s, DSS grew rapidly as small school districts faced more complex challenges and pressures to cut costs, particularly in administration. In response to this growth, DSS organized itself into four practice departments - Procurement and Systems, Information Technology, Contract Negotiation, and Facilities Planning - to deal with different types of engagements. Business came primarily through contacts the five founders had developed. Once DSS was engaged, the project would be referred to the head of the appropriate practice group who would assign consultants to the project. Chris Peterson and the Southwest Region Team Chris Peterson joined DSS in 2001. She started her career as a high school teacher in a small school district in Iowa. When the district began to deploy personal computers, she was asked to head up the implementation in her school. The process went so smoothly that she was asked to give up classroom teaching and work full-time for the district in rolling out technology across all the schools. After five years in that job she joined DSS as a consultant in the Information Technology group. She rose to the position of project manager in the group and had been very successful in leading consulting projects. When the decision was made to reorganize into cross-functional teams, Chris was seen as a natural to lead one of the teams and was assigned to head the Southwest Region team. Chris looked on her new assignment with a mixture of excitement and apprehension. Much of the excitement came from the opportunity to lead a permanent team rather than coordinate individuals for short consulting projects. Her apprehension came in large part because of some uncertainties about how the new strategy would unfold. Chris was aware that many people were ambivalent about the new strategy and uncertain about the necessity of the change and whether or not it was likely to be successful. The result of this was that there was a great deal of anxiety among many consultants about the future of DSS and their roles in the new structure. Chris also suspected that the strategy was still evolving and might change as management got a sense of how well the new organization was working. One of the decisions that Meg had made about the new teams was that the team leaders ought to have a great deal of flexibility in inviting people to join their teams. Chris welcomed this opportunity. In thinking about who she wanted for the team, she considered two factors. First, she wanted people who had good skills and were experienced in the DSS consulting process. Second, she felt she needed people who would be able to work together well. She believed this would be important because of both the nature of the work to be done and her fear that the anxiety created by the change would boil over into dissatisfaction if people had trouble working together. Chris gave a great deal of thought about who to ask to join the Southwest Region team. She decided that one thing that would help the group work together smoothly would be to select people who already had some experience in working with one another. Overall, Chris was quite happy with the team she was able to put together. She ended up asking two consultants each from Contract Negotiations, Procurement and Systems, and Information Technology, and one consultant from the Facilities group to join the team, all of whom accepted. Even though the consultants had not worked on specific projects with each other in the past, they knew one another and had a great deal in common. Nearly all of them had worked on DSS's annual Habitat for Humanity project and all had started at DSS at about the same time. Many members of the group socialized with one another outside of work. At the first group meeting Chris realized that her strategy had worked well. Two of the consultants marveled about how nice it would be to work with people who were both very competent and friends as well. Another consultant mentioned that he didn't know many people at DSS other than the members of his new team and he was really looking forward to the project. Like most DSS consultants, members of Chris's new team had some questions about the new strategy and leadership; however all believed that their new team had tremendous potential. As members of the team began finishing the consulting projects they had been working on, they were able to devote more time to developing specifications for the new system. The majority of the team were now spending nearly all their time working with one another and saw less and less of the other consultants who were not on the team. Occasionally people would bring up what other consultants had said their teams were doing, but this seldom generated much interest and was sometimes seen as almost a distraction to the group. At this point in time, Chris had two primary goals for the team. First, she wanted to keep the group focused on the jobs of defining the new system and determining exactly how DSS consultants would use it. Second, she wanted to help the group avoid distractions and continue to build cohesion. In addition to working with the team, Chris tried to deal with people outside the group. She had developed friendships with two superintendents in small districts and when she saw them, she took the opportunity to describe the system her team was developing. Generally, the feedback she received was positive and she relayed this to her team. Chris also met occasionally with Meg to update her on the project; however these meetings were generally short. Chris observed that some of the other team leaders spent more time meeting with Meg than she did, but she didn't see that there was much need for her to do so, given the progress her team was making. Developing the Planning and Budgeting System Once the specific design of the proposed budget and planning system was complete, Chris felt it was time to share the work of the team with others. She took a detailed description of the program out to a number of districts she had worked with in the past and asked for comments. She also emailed the program description to Meg and some of the DSS functional specialists who would have to provide some technical support in developing the consulting protocols and specifying parts of the code for managing the data base. The conversations with people in the districts were informative and more-or-less positive. While generally expressing support for the new system, people in the districts raised some specific questions. Many of the comments or questions were about how the system would deal with issues that were unique to a district. A few questions emerged about the price of the product and how it would differ from other products already on the market. When Chris took these comments back to the group they tried to modify the initial design and specifications of the program to meet the concerns that were raised. This worked well in the short run, but as more comments came in, the group began to flounder as the team tried to adapt the design to meet many of the questions from outsiders. The reactions from others inside DSS were different from those in the districts. Most of the functional specialists who received descriptions of the project simply acknowledged receiving them but did not offer any real comments. Meg responded by asking a couple of questions and saying that she and Chris would talk more about it later. Overall, the group was pleased with these responses; no one had raised any objections to the program design or identified any difficulties that would slow the project down. As the group worked to change the project specifications in response to the comments coming in from the districts, Chris felt that the effective process the group had developed was beginning to break down. There were disagreements about how important various comments actually were and progress in finalizing the specifications seemed to slow. Team members began to voice more concerns than they had in the past about the direction DSS was going and question whether the team would be able to accomplish its task. Chris decided that something needed to be done to get the group back on track. She cancelled work on the next Friday and had the whole team meet at a nearby nature preserve. After a hike, the group returned to Chris's house for a barbeque lunch. Following lunch, the members spent the rest of the afternoon discussing how they were performing and what they needed to do to finish designing the project. Overall, this seemed to work quite well. When the team got back to work on Monday, they quickly finalized the specifications and identified the steps that would be necessary to actually develop the product and consulting protocols. The team turned its attention to completing the project. The project had four components: a database program provided by a third-party vendor; a program for putting information into the database program written by an outside consulting firm; a set of forms districts would use to organize information about schedules and budgets; and a set of instructions for consultants to use in helping districts use the program and its results. The team split into sub-groups to work on pieces of the final project. Putting together the forms and developing instructions for consultants were the most challenging parts of the project. Both of these tasks required detailed knowledge about the different types of projects districts might undertake. Although members of the team had the knowledge and experience to complete most of this work, they often found that they needed to draw on the specialized knowledge of the DSS specialists in the practice groups. When a specific question came up that the team could not answer, one member of the Southwest team would either email a question or have a face-to-face meeting with the specialist. This worked well for simple issues but not for more complex problems. When team members tried to get functional specialists to spend time working on these more complex problems, they were often not given much help and were occasionally rebuffed. Chris found that she often had to go directly to the manager of the practice area to try to get support. Even this didn't always work. One event typified the problem Chris was experiencing. She met with the head of Contract Negotiation to identify the specific information about a district's employees that would need to be entered into the program. He told Chris that he would ask one of his specialists to work on it with the team. When one member of Chris's team contacted the specialist, he was told that this project had not been built into her schedule and that she would not be able to help him until other things got done. Chris Peterson at DSS Consulting Deborah Ancona and David Caldwell Late Thursday afternoon, Chris Peterson was reflecting on the meeting she would have tomorrow with her boss, Meg Cooke. The purpose of the meeting was to give Meg an update on the status of the integrated budget and planning system her team had been working on over the last six months and plans for the team to begin marketing this system and other new DSS consulting services to clients. Overall, Chris was quite pleased with the work her team had done. The team had been formed as part of a strategic change, including a somewhat controversial re-organization at DSS. The changes and new structure had created dissatisfaction and a fair amount of anxiety among many of DSS's consultants, but Chris felt her team had overcome their concerns to become a very effective group. They had worked together well, avoided the conflicts that often plague these kinds of teams, and generally maintained a high level of motivation and satisfaction. Most of all, Chris was proud of the work her team had done. They had created a budget and planning system that the team believed would be embraced by DSS's clients. The team had not gotten much support from other groups at DSS in developing the system, so team members had done much of the technical work on their own that would have normally been done by support people in the company. Despite this, Chris was very pleased with the system and looked forward to sharing her team's accomplishments with Meg. DSS Consulting DSS Consulting was formed in 1997 to provide administrative support to small school districts primarily in the mid-west and mountain west. The company was founded by three retired school district administrators to help small school districts that had limited staff deal with difficult and somewhat specialized administrative problems, such as negotiating labor agreements or setting up procurement systems. During the late 1990s, DSS grew rapidly as small school districts faced more complex challenges and pressures to cut costs, particularly in administration. In response to this growth, DSS organized itself into four practice departments - Procurement and Systems, Information Technology, Contract Negotiation, and Facilities Planning - to deal with different types of engagements. Business came primarily through contacts the five founders had developed. Once DSS was engaged, the project would be referred to the head of the appropriate practice group who would assign consultants to the project. Chris Peterson and the Southwest Region Team Chris Peterson joined DSS in 2001. She started her career as a high school teacher in a small school district in Iowa. When the district began to deploy personal computers, she was asked to head up the implementation in her school. The process went so smoothly that she was asked to give up classroom teaching and work full-time for the district in rolling out technology across all the schools. After five years in that job she joined DSS as a consultant in the Information Technology group. She rose to the position of project manager in the group and had been very successful in leading consulting projects. When the decision was made to reorganize into cross-functional teams, Chris was seen as a natural to lead one of the teams and was assigned to head the Southwest Region team. Chris looked on her new assignment with a mixture of excitement and apprehension. Much of the excitement came from the opportunity to lead a permanent team rather than coordinate individuals for short consulting projects. Her apprehension came in large part because of some uncertainties about how the new strategy would unfold. Chris was aware that many people were ambivalent about the new strategy and uncertain about the necessity of the change and whether or not it was likely to be successful. The result of this was that there was a great deal of anxiety among many consultants about the future of DSS and their roles in the new structure. Chris also suspected that the strategy was still evolving and might change as management got a sense of how well the new organization was working. One of the decisions that Meg had made about the new teams was that the team leaders ought to have a great deal of flexibility in inviting people to join their teams. Chris welcomed this opportunity. In thinking about who she wanted for the team, she considered two factors. First, she wanted people who had good skills and were experienced in the DSS consulting process. Second, she felt she needed people who would be able to work together well. She believed this would be important because of both the nature of the work to be done and her fear that the anxiety created by the change would boil over into dissatisfaction if people had trouble working together. Chris gave a great deal of thought about who to ask to join the Southwest Region team. She decided that one thing that would help the group work together smoothly would be to select people who already had some experience in working with one another. Overall, Chris was quite happy with the team she was able to put together. She ended up asking two consultants each from Contract Negotiations, Procurement and Systems, and Information Technology, and one consultant from the Facilities group to join the team, all of whom accepted. Even though the consultants had not worked on specific projects with each other in the past, they knew one another and had a great deal in common. Nearly all of them had worked on DSS's annual Habitat for Humanity project and all had started at DSS at about the same time. Many members of the group socialized with one another outside of work. At the first group meeting Chris realized that her strategy had worked well. Two of the consultants marveled about how nice it would be to work with people who were both very competent and friends as well. Another consultant mentioned that he didn't know many people at DSS other than the members of his new team and he was really looking forward to the project. Like most DSS consultants, members of Chris's new team had some questions about the new strategy and leadership; however all believed that their new team had tremendous potential. As members of the team began finishing the consulting projects they had been working on, they were able to devote more time to developing specifications for the new system. The majority of the team were now spending nearly all their time working with one another and saw less and less of the other consultants who were not on the team. Occasionally people would bring up what other consultants had said their teams were doing, but this seldom generated much interest and was sometimes seen as almost a distraction to the group. At this point in time, Chris had two primary goals for the team. First, she wanted to keep the group focused on the jobs of defining the new system and determining exactly how DSS consultants would use it. Second, she wanted to help the group avoid distractions and continue to build cohesion. In addition to working with the team, Chris tried to deal with people outside the group. She had developed friendships with two superintendents in small districts and when she saw them, she took the opportunity to describe the system her team was developing. Generally, the feedback she received was positive and she relayed this to her team. Chris also met occasionally with Meg to update her on the project; however these meetings were generally short. Chris observed that some of the other team leaders spent more time meeting with Meg than she did, but she didn't see that there was much need for her to do so, given the progress her team was making. Developing the Planning and Budgeting System Once the specific design of the proposed budget and planning system was complete, Chris felt it was time to share the work of the team with others. She took a detailed description of the program out to a number of districts she had worked with in the past and asked for comments. She also emailed the program description to Meg and some of the DSS functional specialists who would have to provide some technical support in developing the consulting protocols and specifying parts of the code for managing the data base. The conversations with people in the districts were informative and more-or-less positive. While generally expressing support for the new system, people in the districts raised some specific questions. Many of the comments or questions were about how the system would deal with issues that were unique to a district. A few questions emerged about the price of the product and how it would differ from other products already on the market. When Chris took these comments back to the group they tried to modify the initial design and specifications of the program to meet the concerns that were raised. This worked well in the short run, but as more comments came in, the group began to flounder as the team tried to adapt the design to meet many of the questions from outsiders. The reactions from others inside DSS were different from those in the districts. Most of the functional specialists who received descriptions of the project simply acknowledged receiving them but did not offer any real comments. Meg responded by asking a couple of questions and saying that she and Chris would talk more about it later. Overall, the group was pleased with these responses; no one had raised any objections to the program design or identified any difficulties that would slow the project down. As the group worked to change the project specifications in response to the comments coming in from the districts, Chris felt that the effective process the group had developed was beginning to break down. There were disagreements about how important various comments actually were and progress in finalizing the specifications seemed to slow. Team members began to voice more concerns than they had in the past about the direction DSS was going and question whether the team would be able to accomplish its task. Chris decided that something needed to be done to get the group back on track. She cancelled work on the next Friday and had the whole team meet at a nearby nature preserve. After a hike, the group returned to Chris's house for a barbeque lunch. Following lunch, the members spent the rest of the afternoon discussing how they were performing and what they needed to do to finish designing the project. Overall, this seemed to work quite well. When the team got back to work on Monday, they quickly finalized the specifications and identified the steps that would be necessary to actually develop the product and consulting protocols. The team turned its attention to completing the project. The project had four components: a database program provided by a third-party vendor; a program for putting information into the database program written by an outside consulting firm; a set of forms districts would use to organize information about schedules and budgets; and a set of instructions for consultants to use in helping districts use the program and its results. The team split into sub-groups to work on pieces of the final project. Putting together the forms and developing instructions for consultants were the most challenging parts of the project. Both of these tasks required detailed knowledge about the different types of projects districts might undertake. Although members of the team had the knowledge and experience to complete most of this work, they often found that they needed to draw on the specialized knowledge of the DSS specialists in the practice groups. When a specific question came up that the team could not answer, one member of the Southwest team would either email a question or have a face-to-face meeting with the specialist. This worked well for simple issues but not for more complex problems. When team members tried to get functional specialists to spend time working on these more complex problems, they were often not given much help and were occasionally rebuffed. Chris found that she often had to go directly to the manager of the practice area to try to get support. Even this didn't always work. One event typified the problem Chris was experiencing. She met with the head of Contract Negotiation to identify the specific information about a district's employees that would need to be entered into the program. He told Chris that he would ask one of his specialists to work on it with the team. When one member of Chris's team contacted the specialist, he was told that this project had not been built into her schedule and that she would not be able to help him until other things got done