Intercultural Communication Leadership

1) The advice was basically correct. There are a couple of issues hampered the team that relate to leadership. First, there is only so much Porter can do as a minor league manager with respect to the talent on the field, but he must recognize that talent has a leadership dynamic to it. He needs to ensure that there are strong leaders in the locker room who are among the players expected to be there for the entire season – the ability to maintain leadership in the room even when the on-field leaders move onwards is important. Losing talent does not have to mean losing leadership.

As for himself, it is clear that the laissez-faire leadership style was ineffective. That style of leadership works best when the people on the team are already strong leaders, and clearly the call-ups eroded the leadership group on the team. So Darrell needed to fill that gap. There are a number of different conflict management styles that leaders can employ. Porter needs to respect the fact that there are significant cultural differences between players on a baseball team, but that within the context of these differences everybody has the objective... He should have either taken a mediator approach, or taken a harder approach and dictated the terms to the young players, but either way he needed to become more involved in the dispute resolution, understood the nature of the disputes, and taken action to refocus the attention of the players (Llopis, 2014).
2) The department needs fresh leadership, as it has been beset by high turnover. Most people are low-skilled, and are likely to respect seniority – and that is the normal union cultural leadership. Furthermore, there is evidence to suggest that people respect leaders who know how to do their own jobs (Llopis, 2013). In a tough work environment, having a leader who has been in the trenches is symbolically important – Callahan is one of them. Even if Novak is highly-competent, his lack of seniority and college education make him stand out. For the same reasons he is an appealing choice for management, he will have trouble with the workers if it is perceived that he has wrongly displaced Callahan in this wrong. I would choose Callahan – we need this department working…