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What a Star-What a Jerk: Harvard Business Review Case

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What a Star-What a Jerk: Harvard Business Review Case
As a team leader, Jane has already touched based with her group and recognized everybody’s role: Tom is “the joker,” Jack is “the intellectual,” Caroline is “the mom” and Andy is “the top performer and troublemaker.” She understands that all of them are high-paid employees and have been working as a group for a while, at least much longer than she has. As far as the performance, Jane believes that they are high performers and make up a very interesting and strong group; although there is no evidence of it since the company has been trying to keep the top 80% of employees, so all the members but Andy could be still working because the management like them and also be considered as average performers or even lower-level. What is true and seems to be temporary: Caroline, the oldest member, is currently having a questionable efficiency because some personal issues. Moreover, Jane has made up her mind with the idea that Andy has not only the best performance but also a nasty and irreversible behavior, so the team is pretty much split in two sides: Andy and the rest. Based on her first impressions about the company’s too-nicey-nice atmosphere, should she also think about that as Andy and the company? There is no way to know this. But what it seems to be obvious, is that the latter leader couldn’t fix this whole situation up either.

Andy’s behavior is always affecting the group with his frequently signals of nastiness. Since Jane’s start, he’s been stepping all over each member: Jack and the too-long-to-explain-flawed idea, Caroline and the “big mistake” with Andy’s 8-month important prospect, Tom and some kind of hot discussion. Even over Jane’s assistants, Maureen and Danielle, because of some “routine” mistakes (scheduling and customer’s information request, respectively). Hitting almost one month of e-mailing with Rick (an outside adviser, who acknowledged her as “softie” with routine mistakes), she’s still taking her time to explore the group and trying to figure

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