The fashionpreneur is a competent and creative fashion designer, at first she worked on her own as an independent contractor.

Then because of a dramatic increase in the number of new clients, she became swamped with requests for her services and
decided to start her own company.

She hired a secretary–bookkeeper and four fashion designers, all of whom are highly competent. She still does designing jobs
herself and has adopted a hands-off approach to leading the four designers who report to her because she feels that fashion design
is a very personal, creative endeavor. Rather than pay the designers on some kind of commission basis (such as a percentage of
their customers’ total billings), she pays them a premium salary, higher than average, so they are motivated to do what’s best for
a customer’s needs and not what will result in higher billings and commissions.

She thought everything was going smoothly until customer complaints started coming in. The complaints ranged from the
designers’ being hard to reach, promising unrealistic delivery times, and being late for or failing to keep appointments to their
being impatient and rude when customers had trouble making up their minds. She knows her designers are competent and is
concerned that she is not effectively leading and managing them. She wonders, in particular, if her hands-off approach is to
blame and if she should change the manner in which she rewards or pays her designers. She has asked for your advice.

1. Analyze the sources of power that she has available to her to influence the designers. What advice can you give her to either
increase her power base or use her existing power more effectively?

2. Given what you have learned in this chapter (for example, from the behavior model and path–goal theory), does she seem to be
performing appropriate leader behaviors in this situation? What advice can you give her about the kinds of behaviors she should
perform?

3. What steps would you advise her to take to increase the designers’ motivation to deliver high-quality customer service?

4. Would you advise her to try to engage in transformational leadership in this situation? If not, why not? If so, what steps would
you advise her to take?

Deliverables:

Minutes of meeting. Meeting must not exceed 30 mins.