Case Study

A number of years ago, two medical technologists with essentially the same educational backgrounds, experience and tenure in a large laboratory were place in management positions at about the same time. As opposed to being paid for performing their technical specialty, they were now being paid for being technical administrators, or supervisors of departements in which clinical laboratory testing was performed. At the end of the first 6 months, one of them was experiencing considerable success and enjoying his new managerial job. The other was no so successful. He was experiencing problems in meeting schedules and test report deadlines, there was a degree of unrest among the technologists in his departement, and himself was becoming discouraged and frustated. Higher level management was becoming concerned about the situation.