Micromanagement Case Study

Introduction

Leadership is the vehicle used within organizations to point the workforce towards achieving organizational goals. Therefore, in today’s marketplace, it is imperative that organizations have a workforce that can achieve these goals and that they also have leaders that can energize their workforce by cultivating an environments of high morale.

Morale

What is morale? Swartout, Boykin, Dixon & Ivanov (2015) define employee or organizational morale as the feeling someone has while in the workplace. Swartout et.al (2015) sites Deming’s five deadly diseases as the causes of low morale: 1) Lack of constancy of purpose, where employees observe common practices of an organization reacting to problems by putting out fires rather

Delgado, Strauss & Ortega, (2015) discussed micromanagement as a major contributor to low employee morale. Managers can be overly involved in the mechanics of how projects will be executed, limiting the power of their employees to achieve goals and contribute to their organization’s bottom-line. These limitations can negatively affect employee-’s morale because employees can feel disconnected from having any effect on the organization’s bottom line due to over-indulgent managers. The authors believe that in order to avoid micromanagement, leaders should have a system in place so that employees can frequently self-check themselves, and therefore giving the employees the tools needed to perform their task independently of the

Greenleaf’s Theory emphasized that an effective leader is one who puts the servants’ needs ahead of their own in an effort to help the individual grow and develop as human beings. Jones notes that organizations that practice servant leadership in tough economic times will have a healthy workforce that will increase organizational performance and employee job satisfaction leading to increased morale. Trust and honesty are at the core of servant leadership, in that followers view servant leaders as being moral and not elevating themselves above subordinates within the organization Jones, (2012). Southwest Airlines practices servant leadership and has enjoyed 37 years of profitability and low employee turnover, which are associated with increased levels of morale Jones, (2012). Southwest believes that by creating a culture of servant leadership and having a committee that enforces it across all levels of the organization has led to success within the organization because employees had a high sense of ownership and are happier doing their