PSYC 648 Week 5 Leadership Assessment Project Example

Leadership Assessment Project: Using the LMX 7 Questionnaire to Map a Warehouse Operations Manager's Relationships With Five Shift Leads

Summary of the Case

Teresa has managed operations at a regional distribution center for three years. Six months ago, a reorganization moved her from overseeing two shifts to overseeing five, each run by a shift lead. Since then, turnover on two shifts has nearly doubled, while the other three remain stable. Exit interviews from the troubled shifts mention feeling disconnected from management and unsure whether concerns reach anyone who can act. Teresa describes herself as accessible and fair, and her own manager rates her highly. She agreed to an assessment because she wanted to understand why two shifts seemed to be struggling. Before the reorganization, Teresa had worked weekdays alongside her two original leads for years, often eating lunch with them and covering for them during emergencies. The three new leads joined her team through the reorganization from another building, and two of them work weekends, when Teresa is usually off site.

Proposed Assessment

Several Northouse instruments were considered. A style questionnaire measuring task and relationship behaviors would describe Teresa's general approach, and a skills inventory would identify her strengths in technical, human and conceptual skills. Neither, however, would show whether her approach landed differently with different people. The pattern suggested a relational issue rather than a problem of style or skill: Teresa's general approach had not changed, but her relationships might have varied across the five leads. Northouse (2015) presents leader-member exchange theory as a way to examine the quality of each leader-follower relationship separately, and the text includes the LMX 7 questionnaire, developed from the work Graen and Uhl-Bien (1995) summarized. The seven items ask about matters such as how well the leader understands the follower's problems, recognizes the follower's potential and would use her influence to help, with each item rated on a five-point scale for a total from 7 to 35. Each shift lead completed the follower version about Teresa anonymously, and Teresa completed the leader version for each lead.

Assessment and Results

Northouse (2015) describes scores of 30 to 35 as very high, 25 to 29 as high, 20 to 24 as moderate, 15 to 19 as low and 7 to 14 as very low. The two leads Teresa supervised before the reorganization rated their relationships with her as very high, while the three added afterward rated them moderate to low, and the two shifts with rising turnover were the weekend shifts with the lowest scores. Teresa's own ratings were higher than the leads' ratings for every relationship, and the gap widened as the leads' scores fell, reaching nine points for the weekend night lead.

With only five raters and one administration, the results are a snapshot, and the follower ratings may reflect recent events. Still, the pattern was consistent and closely matched the turnover data.

Discussion

The results describe a classic in-group and out-group pattern. Teresa had long-standing, high-trust relationships with the two leads she inherited and had not built comparable relationships with the leads added in the reorganization, especially those on weekends, whom she rarely saw in person. Because she felt accessible, she assumed the relationships were stronger than the leads did. Her open-door policy meant little to leads who worked when her door was closed, and the gap between her ratings and theirs suggests a blind spot she could not have seen without asking. Notably, the newer leads did not describe her as unfair; their lower scores centered on items about understanding their problems and using her influence on their behalf, which fits a relationship that never had the chance to develop rather than one that went wrong.

Research suggests the spread matters for teams, not only individuals. Henderson et al. (2009), reviewing work on LMX differentiation, the extent to which leaders form relationships of differing quality, concluded that differentiation can harm team functioning when members perceive it as unfair or when relationships are visibly unequal. Dulebohn et al. (2012) found that high-quality exchanges are associated with stronger commitment and lower intentions to quit. The weekend leads' low scores may therefore have flowed down to their crews, who lacked a strong connection to management through their lead.

Recommendations

Northouse (2015) presents leadership making as a three-stage path: strangers who relate only through job roles, acquaintances who trade small favors and test each other's reliability and, finally, partners who trust each other deeply. The recommendations aim to move the three newer leads through those phases.

First, Teresa should schedule a standing one-on-one meeting every two weeks with each lead, holding the weekend meetings in person at the start of those shifts, so that the weekend leads receive the same access the original leads have enjoyed for years. Second, she should offer each newer lead a stretch responsibility, such as leading a safety improvement project, since expanded responsibility is a hallmark of the acquaintance phase. Third, she should ask each lead directly what support would help most and act visibly on at least one request within a month. Fourth, she should repeat the LMX 7 in six months to see whether scores have risen and whether the gap between her ratings and the leads' ratings has narrowed. Finally, Teresa should track turnover on each shift, since the ultimate test of stronger relationships is whether crew members stay. She should also be careful not to withdraw from her original leads, since the goal is to raise every relationship to a partnership rather than to equalize them by lowering the strongest.

Conclusion

The LMX 7 assessment turned a vague concern into a specific finding: Teresa's leadership was strong in two relationships and weaker in three, and the weakest relationships matched the shifts losing people. Leader-member exchange theory explains the pattern and offers a path forward through deliberate relationship building with the leads who joined her team most recently. The project also showed the value of measuring relationships from the follower's side: Teresa's own sense of the relationships, sincere as it was, missed exactly the gaps that mattered most.

References

Dulebohn, J. H., Bommer, W. H., Liden, R. C., Brouer, R. L., & Ferris, G. R. (2012). A meta-analysis of antecedents and consequences of leader-member exchange: Integrating the past with an eye toward the future. Journal of Management, 38(6), 1715-1759. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206311415280

Graen, G. B., & Uhl-Bien, M. (1995). Relationship-based approach to leadership: Development of leader-member exchange (LMX) theory of leadership over 25 years: Applying a multi-level multi-domain perspective. The Leadership Quarterly, 6(2), 219-247. https://doi.org/10.1016/1048-9843(95)90036-5

Henderson, D. J., Liden, R. C., Glibkowski, B. C., & Chaudhry, A. (2009). LMX differentiation: A multilevel review and examination of its antecedents and outcomes. The Leadership Quarterly, 20(4), 517-534. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2009.04.003

Northouse, P. G. (2015). Leadership: Theory and practice (7th ed.). SAGE.