Case: How to Motivate Fred Maiorino

Introduction

Fred Maiorino had been a successful sales manager for Schering-Plough Corporation for thirty-one years before Jim Reed was named general sales manager over the South Jersey sales district that included Fred’s sales territory. Afterwards, Reed implemented several changes to try to boost sales including a new performance appraisal system and a hands-on coaching style to motivate his sales staff. The problem arose with Reed’s inability to motivate Fred (Buller & Schuler, 2003).

Major Issues
The major issue is this case is Reed’s inability to motivate Fred, which inevitably led to the dismal of a long-time loyal employee. The major issues associated with this motivation problem include Reed’s unsuccessful leadership attempt, the de-motivating factors of the appraisal system, and the violation of the psychological contract.

Reed’s Unsuccessful Leadership Attempt

One major issue is Reed’s unsuccessful attempt at leading Fred. One could describes Reed’s leadership style as a directive leadership behavior of the path-goal theory that one typically uses with a new employee or a transactional leadership style that is used by many sales persons according to Dubinsky, Yammarino, Jolson, and Spanger (2001). “Sales managers generally employ transactional leadership behavior which can “induce adequate attitudinal and behavioral responses in employees, transformational leadership has found to engender even higher results” (Dubinsky et al., 2001, p. 17). Reed’s leadership style could have been described as transactional as he identified and clarified Fred’s job task and then communicated to Fred how to go about being successful at executing his job task (Buller & Schuler, 2003; Dubinsky et al., 2001). This was apparent when he went through Fred’s computer files to determine the large volume drug