1. What type of situational leadership style did the CEO of each plant demonstrate?

2. Which of these styles was more appropriate in view of the Situational Leadership model? Why?

3. Would it be surprising to find out that Plant A was more successful in achieving the goals of the quality system? Why or why not?

A large pharmaceutical manufacture was highly motivated to meet quality challenges. They implemented an ISO 900 compatible quality system to ensure not only FDA compliance requirements, but also customer satisfaction.

As the manufacturing plants of the organization were audited by the internal audit division, it becomes apparent that some plants were meeting the challenge, while others continued to struggle in both the quality and regulatory aspects of production. This fact was evident in the reports of internal findings and in FDA inspection reports.

For the most part the manufacturing plants share consistent resources and face similar environments. All were issued the responsibility of meeting the expectations of the quality system through the same mechanism. All understood the consequences of not conforming, that is jeopardizing their manufacturing licence as bund by the constant decree. The issue then become why some plants could successfully design and implement the requirements of where as other could not and still cannot.

Although the plants where similar in many ways, they differed in terms of leadership, as each plant has its own CEO. The CEO, as the leader of his/ her plant, has the responsibility of ensuring the successful implementation of a quality system. The plant also differs in their organisational members, those who are to be lead by the CEO. The relationship between the leader and organisational members is critical to a plant's ability to implement an effective quality system, with effectiveness began a measure of how successfully a plant can comply with FDA regulations and internal quality standards.

Both plants had a similar culture that could be best described as conserving, reflecting a level of rigidity in response to the external environment, but demonstrating organisational commitment. The strategy used by the leader in plant A was a combination of moderate to high amounts of structuring actions, with high to moderate amounts of inspiring actions, where as the strategy used by plant B's CEO was a combination of moderate to low amounts of structuring actions, with moderate to high amounts of inspiring actions.