DDBA 8151 Week 3 Interview Synthesis Example

Same Change, Different Stories by Level: An Interview Synthesis on Why Yard Managers at a Twelve-Yard Building Supply Company Now Send Contractor Credit Decisions to the Region

Student Name

Walden University

DDBA 8151: Organizational Leadership

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Same Change, Different Stories by Level: An Interview Synthesis on Why Yard Managers at a Twelve-Yard Building Supply Company Now Send Contractor Credit Decisions to the Region

Method

I interviewed ten people between September 8 and September 26: four yard managers from four different yards, two outside sales representatives, the regional credit manager, two regional directors and the vice president of operations. Yard managers were chosen to include the manager whose yard was named in the April 2025 audit discussion, one manager who joined after that meeting and two long-serving managers. Each interview lasted 35 to 60 minutes and followed the same five questions, built from what the records review left open. I took notes during each interview and wrote them up the same day; no recordings were made, at participants' request. I coded the notes using the stepwise approach Braun and Clarke (2006) describe, generating codes, grouping them into themes and checking each theme against the full set of notes.

What Is Your Credit Authority Now?

All four yard managers said they did not know. One long-serving manager said: "The matrix says twenty-five thousand. The memo said credit is regional. Nobody has told me which one wins." The newest manager had never seen the matrix. The regional credit manager said managers still had their $25,000 authority and that the regional office was meant to "coordinate policy, not approve every exception." The two regional directors disagreed with each other: one said the limit still stood; the other believed it had been lowered informally to $10,000 after the audit. The vice president said limits had not changed and was surprised to learn managers were unsure.

What Did You Take From the April 2025 Meeting?

Here the split by level was sharpest. All four yard managers described the meeting as the moment their approach changed. The manager whose yard was named said: "I stood up in front of everyone and explained a bad year. I am not doing that twice." Another said the message he heard was that "the person who approves an exception owns the loss, personally." Both regional directors described the meeting as a routine review of audit findings and said they intended no criticism. The vice president had not attended.

What Does a Manager Risk by Approving an Exception?

Yard managers described the risk as personal and public: a bad debt would be traced to the approver and discussed in front of peers. Sending the request to the region, two said, meant that "if it goes bad, it is the region's." The regional credit manager saw the same behavior from the other side, saying the office now receives "requests with no recommendation attached, just the file." Both sales representatives described contractors waiting and two jobs lost to a competitor.

Where Levels Converge and Split

Levels agree on what changed: yard managers stopped approving credit exceptions in spring 2025. They disagree on why. Yard managers describe a reasonable response to ambiguous authority and a visible penalty for error. The executive describes a change in attitude. Regional staff sit between.

Table 1

Agreement and Disagreement by Level

Counts refer to the number of interviewees at each level giving that answer.

My Own Expectations

Before the interviews I expected the restructuring to be the main explanation and the audit discussion to be minor. Coghlan and Brannick (2014) urge insider researchers to record their expectations beforehand so they can see when the data surprise them. The data did: every yard manager named the April meeting first, without prompting, and the restructuring second. I had underestimated how much a single public discussion could shape behavior across twelve yards.

Checking the Synthesis

I sent each interviewee a one-page summary of the themes, without attribution, and asked whether it matched their experience. Eight replied; seven agreed, and one regional director asked that the summary note his view that the April meeting was intended as learning, not blame, which it now does. Miles et al. (2014) describe this kind of participant check as a way to catch misreadings, though it cannot settle disagreements between participants.

What the Interviews Contradict and Confirm

The interviews confirm the records' dated shift and the ambiguity of the authority matrix. They contradict the presented framing at the level of the people it describes: none of the yard managers saw the change as a loss of ownership.

References

Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3(2), 77-101. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa

Coghlan, D., & Brannick, T. (2014). Doing action research in your own organization (4th ed.). SAGE Publications.

Miles, M. B., Huberman, A. M., & Saldana, J. (2014). Qualitative data analysis: A methods sourcebook (3rd ed.). SAGE Publications.