Ethics Case - Lisa Benton

Introduction

According to this case, we know that Lisa Benton is frustrated about her job in Houseworld. She cannot get the marketing training which most attracted her to this company at the beginning, and she also cannot build a good relationship with her boss, Deborah Linton, and the senior associate in her department, Ron Scoville. Lisa thinks this is one of most important things in her job. In this case study, I will discuss Lisa's relationship in the Home Care Division, how did she use her power within the organization, and how can she do in order to develop her power in Houseworld.

The relationship between Lisa and her organization

I'll try to answer these questions in each relationship: what type of power did Lisa have? How did her power get blocked?

Lisa-Linton

Because of Bob Mitchell, the vice president of marketing, the recruiting practice has emphasized recruiting MBAs from top-notch schools for entry-level marketing positions. This decision makes it difficult for Linton, also Scoville, to be promoted. This fosters their negative attitudes toward MBAs, especially Harvard MBAs. Unfortunately. Lisa got her Harvard MBA which didn't make a good first impression on Linton. Because of Lisa's background, Linton didn't give Lisa a good welcome which made her upset and disappointed. According to her experience, she expected that she could get along with everyone well, including her boss. Besides Linton, Richard Clark, Home Care group Product Manager, seemed to have totally forgotten her. Lisa expects an enthusiastic welcome, but she received an opposite responses which will not fulfill her emotional needs and also will reduce her motivation in her department.

Because Linton doesn't like Lisa, it seems that she ignored Lisa's ability on purpose and did not assign Lisa a "challenging task." Linton uses traditional first line supervisory methods that block Lisa. Using Linton's legitimate as well as her coercive power base is not appropriate for Lisa. These two kinds of power bases are both suitable for low to middle task maturity. In these task maturities, the situational leaderships are "telling" and "selling" which mean that employees need to have appropriate task directions and opportunities to have two-way communications with their managers. Linton failed Lisa by assuming that her task maturity was low. Since Lisa did a great job when she was in her full-time internship, she may have enough job skills to develop her expert power. But she failed to do this due to her intimidating conversations with Scoville and Linton. Lisa chose to keep silent when she had opportunities to speak.

Also, Linton's behavior blocked Lisa's development of her expert power. When Lisa