Leadership and Decision Making: William R. Ruckelshaus and the Environmental Protection Agency

Abstract

This paper applies case study methodology to analyze secondary data on the two-term EPA administrator, WR. Ruckelshaus. The paper has two objectives.. The first objective is to examine the plausibility of the proposition that leadership of real world organizations has three defining characteristics: the setting of a strategic direction or vision, concern with changing the status quo, and the energizing of others to act by swaying their expectations, aspirations, and commitments. The second objective of the paper is to demonstrate the utility of a five-component framework of leadership decision making developed by Lipshitz and Mann (2004) for studying the relatively neglected subject of the leadership process. The paper is divided into three sections. The first two sections deal with Ruckelshaus ' first and second terms as EPA administrator and consist of a brief outline of the terms' history, a description of an illustrative key decision and analysis. The concluding section discusses the utility of studying leadership from a decision making perspective. The case shows that Ruckelshaus is clearly concerned with all three issues delineated by the proposed defining characteristics.. In addition it shows that using the Lipshitz and Mann (2004) framework can generate a detailed description of the actions and differential concerns of specific leaders, highlight distinctions between different leaders, and track how the leadership of a single leader under different circumstances. Finally, it indicates that conceptualizing leadership as an influence relationship between a leader and his followers should be expanded to include a wider community of internal and external stakeholders and a wider set of "managerial" functions.