Anders Dahlgren is the mentor for a high school robotics team that has spent the past three months designing, building, and programming a robot for competition. The team is composed of 14 boys and one girl, and the students range from freshmen to seniors. With the first competition in three weeks, Anders needs to designate a team captain so the team can get used to working under a new leader.

During the competition, the team captain is often called on to make crucial team decisions. The robotics team is divided into groups: Mechanical, whose members design and build the robot, and Programming, whose members develop the computer code that tells the robot how to complete its tasks. During competition, the team captain will have to work with both groups to tweak the robot’s design and programming on the fly to improve the robot’s performance. It can be a high-pressure job for any teenager, and with emotions and stress levels of other team members running on high, the captain will not only need an understanding of both the mechanical and programming aspects, but must also be able to keep 14 other personalities and egos working toward a common goal.

There are three members of the robotics team that Anders is considering for captain:

• Pria is a junior and the only girl on the team. This is her second year on the team, and she is in the Programming group. Anders describes her as being very serious and a whiz at coding, and she has offered some great design ideas. Pria is very organized—after the team’s first meeting of the year, she developed a schedule with tasks and deadlines and wrote it on the large whiteboard in the workshop so team members could follow it. Pria doesn’t have a lot of patience with teenage boy shenanigans and will admonish her group members to “focus, please” whenever she thinks they’ve gotten off task, such as when they start talking about YouTube videos or music. Pria is very rule-bound and will point out when team members try to cut corners or haven’t adequately followed instructions or the schedule. Anders has noticed that when the other programming group members have a problem or obstacle, they defer to Pria for a solution. He suspects it’s partly because they respect her opinion and partly because they know she’ll tell them how to fix it regardless. Once, though, when Pria was home sick, Anders overheard several of the boys from both groups call Pria “bossy” and say she “stressed them out” with her deadlines and rigidity........

Questions 

1. How would you describe the individual leadership styles of Pria, Justin, and Jerome?

2. Based on the assumptions of Theory X and Theory Y, how would you describe Pria, Justin, and Jerome’s individual philosophies of leadership?

3. The robotics team will be asked to compete in a situation that sounds like it will be intense and stressful. Do you think a democratic leader would be as effective as an authoritarian leader in this situation?