Vidsoft Case and Leadership

Question 1

Summary of the situation at Vidsoft.

Babatunde, a senior manager at Vidsoft needed to create a new layer consisting of 2 managers, between himself and his eleven reporting engineers, as his responsibilities had recently increased and he was unable to remain effective. The culture of the organisation was to promote from within and Jennah Li was the only candidate Babatunde felt comfortable would continue the success of the team. She had no prior managerial experience, however Babatunde believed he could develop her into the role and the team agreed.

A few weeks into the promotion of Li, Hsu approached Babatunde with various issues he had regarding working under Li. He felt that as she did not possess a science degree she would be unable to understand the difficulties he had encountered in attaining his computer engineering degree. He also stated that he had joined the organisation as he had been impressed with Babatunde’s management style. His last issue was that he would be unable to learn from Li due to her lack of experience in managing people. Hsu wanted to be transferred over to the team that Babatunde had yet to find a manager for.

Babatunde met with Li afterwards and conveyed Hsu’s problems in working for her. She was surprised, upset and felt she was failing as a manager. Several meetings with Hsu, Li and Babatunde then took place over the next two weeks. Hsu remained inflexible on wanting to be a member of the other team. Li wanted Hsu to remain on her team concerned that the transfer of Hsu could have a negative impact on her team.

How can this situation be best resolved?

"Resolution aims somehow to get to the root causes of the conflict and not merely to treat its episodic or symptomatic manifestation, that is, particular dispute."( Avruch, 2007 p 26)

This is the first problem encountered by the team and Babatunde had not expected this problem to develop. Firstly, the team could at this point be involved with the conflict between Hsu and Li. The team has trust in Li and as a successful team, could utilise their personal connections to convince and persuade Hsu of Li’s abilities. However, Hsu is not a team player and as he lacks respect for Li, it is likely he lacks respect for the rest of the team and therefore will require more convincing than the team are able to provide. Exploring Hsu's reasoning for not been happy working for Li can shed light on how to deal with negotiating