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Northouse, Leadership 8e
SAGE Publications, 2019
Case 7.2: Working Hard at Being Fair
Case Synopsis and Analysis
Jenny Hernandez is the production manager at a mid-size mortgage company. Salespeople,
closing officers, underwriters, and other personnel report to Jenny. The company culture is
positive, and employees generally respect each despite their varying pay.
Jenny’s leadership style is relationship oriented. She is fair and kind and works to build a
team-like environment at work. She has an open-door policy and is committed to her work
and the people at her company. She does not exclude people or play favorites and works to
help others understand the pay differentials.
This case study portrays a strong relationship-oriented leader who is effective at work. She
builds up all of her followers and does not have an “out-group.”
Learning objectives:
• Students should be able to determine what leadership-making phase a person is in
under the LMX model (Graen and Uhl-Bien’s model).
• Students should begin to understand the importance of not having an “out-group” and
the difficulty of creating cohesion in a large group.
Answers to questions in the text:
1. Based on the LMX model, how would you describe Jenny’s leadership?
Jenny’s leadership is more of a mature partnership. She has high-quality exchanges
2. How do you think the employees at City Mortgage respond to Jenny?
3. If you were asked to follow in Jenny’s footsteps, do you think you could or would
want to manage City Mortgage with a similar style?
Northouse, Leadership 8e
SAGE Publications, 2019
Students will appreciate Jenny’s style and find it to be effective. However, students
should discuss the difficulty of leading without favoritism. It is a worthy and
Potential teaching approaches:
Below is a way to structure a class based on skill theory and Case Study 7.2:
• Hold a lecture on LMX theory.
• Discuss Questions 1–3 in the case study as a class.
• Finally, the professor may choose to conduct the in-class exercises listed below.
Exercises for this case study:
1) In small groups, students can discuss situations where they were part of an
2) Jenny is a strong and effective leader. Despite having a close friend as subordinate,
she does not play favorites. This is a hard, tall task. Indeed, leaders naturally will find
some subordinates more likeable and/or effective than others. Given that, how can a
leader be truly fair?
3) Have small student groups got to YouTube (or another similar site) and find a short
video clip that shows the downside of LMX (favoritism). Have each group then share
