Analysis

Michael and Ralph, the chefs and teams’ leaders in this episode, exhibit some traits of effective leaders including abilities, personal traits, and motivation. First of all, Michael and Ralph exhibit interpersonal, cognitive, and technical ability skills.

*Technical skills: their technical ability is stemmed from their supervisory ability of being able to cause their followers to accomplish the desired work. In addition, they are professionals in their job as they set objectives for their teams: Michael has the objective of getting his team to work the best they can, while Ralph focuses on perfection and “never losing control” as objectives for his team. The two chefs also plan their work and assign team members to do it: each member is responsible for preparing a certain kind of dish. Michael and Ralph also supervise the results of the work: they check each dish before serving it. Ralph does that better at the beginning, since a plastic piece is found in the pumpkin dish prepared by Michael’s restaurant.

*Interpersonal skills: Michael is able to get along with his team members and to resolve conflicts between them like the one between Jessica and Elsie; Ralph is also able to carefully deal with Dewberry’s stress in a tactful way.

*Cognitive skills: Ralph’s cognitive skills appear in his ability to clearly communicate orders to his team members and in his backup plan of serving snacks to customers waiting for appetizers; Michael doesn’t communicate clearly at the beginning with his team, but later he adopts Chef Ramsay’s aggressive style to communicate orders fluently.

Secondly, Michael and Ralph possess a number of personality traits including energy level, stress tolerance, self-confidence, emotional maturity, integrity, and originality.

*Energy level: both Michael and Ralph have a high energy level as they actively work and give orders to complete serving dinner as quickly as possible.

*Stress Tolerance: Michael shows his tolerance for stress when he is able to control his team members again after they get confused by his unclear orders; Ralph shows tolerance for stress when he is able to quickly manage the change in work resulted by Andrew’s absence and then by Dewberry’s absence; Both chefs overcome their stress as they successfully manage the dinner service at their restaurants, despite of the fierce competition and the time constraints.

*Self-Confidence: both Michael and Ralph show high self-confidence as they are believe in their unique skills and team members; Michael says to his team “my dream is in your hands right now, I couldn’t feel any more confident;” Ralph’s confidence appears in his voice tone, clear orders to his team members, and actions. For example, when Andrew is absent, he says, “I refuse to lose” and immediately comes up with a backup plan.

*Maturity: Ralph shows his emotional maturity when he doesn’t get disturbed because of Dewberry’s stressful situation as he tells him, “Don’t die on me tonight. Die on your own time.” Michael also doesn’t get upset when Jessica and Elsie have a fight, instead he resolves their problem carefully and get them to work together again.

*Integrity: both Michael and Ralph have personal integrity as they share respect, do not cheat on each other, and value their teams’ members.

*Originality: both Michael and Ralph have original ideas as each of them creates his own menu, decorates his restaurant, and chooses the service staff uniforms; Michael uses an LA-modern style theme named Lola Pop, while Ralph uses a New York style Steakhouse named Frank & Lulu's.

Thirdly and finally, Michael and Ralph exhibit some motivational traits including: high need for power, high need for achievement, week need for affiliation, and persuasiveness.

*High need for power: both Michael and Ralph have a high need for power that allows them to lead and control their teams to do the required tasks. This need is satisfied by their positions as head-chefs.

*High need for achievement: Michael’s and Ralph’s high need for achievement is perceived in the scene when they go to the street with their signature dishes. Each one of them desires more people to like his dish in order to win. Also, in his speech before starting the dinner service, Michael encourages his team to do the best they can to achieve winning; Ralph’s high need for achievement is shown in his great focus on “absolute perfection” and on the “list of points of success” to get his team to win the competition.

*Weak need for affiliation: since Michael’s and Ralph’s task requires them to be job-centered instead of employee- centered, they show a week need for affiliation as they are motivated by getting a task completed more than by interacting with other people in their teams. However, this does not prevent the two head chefs from having interpersonal relations with their team members when they are not working on the dinner service.

*Persuasiveness: Ralph persistently reminds his team members of the points of success in his list to convince them about adopting the listed behaviors to win the competition; Michael convinces his team members of their abilities to get the task done and persuade them to work hard for his success as when Jimmy tells Michael, “we will do it for you” and when Jessica says, “the menu was killer and was easy to do.” All teams’ members seem to be motivated because of their leaders’ persuasion ability.