Lead by Example — The Lyon Mega-Hub Merger

A four-round, advanced leadership-and-change simulation set inside Vélocité Logistique, a French regional last-mile operator (EUR 210M revenue, 7% operating margin, 2,400 employees, a 900-vehicle fleet) that has just merged with its larger northern rival Septentrion in a 'merger of equals' everyone on the ground knows is really an acquisition by the north. You are the newly appointed integration manager for the Lyon mega-hub, where 600 employees from both legacy companies — 360 Vélocité, 240 Septentrion — were merged under one roof on day one. Within 72 hours cooperation has fractured: on-time dispatch fell from 96% to 81%, the two teams are hoarding dock equipment and missing cross-team handoffs, perceived fairness sits at 38/100 among legacy Vélocité staff versus 61 among Septentrion staff, 18% of staff intend to leave within six months (the most mobile, most valuable talent first), and a 70-of-600 redundancy is coming that everyone can feel. A EUR 8M/year e-retailer contract renews in 8 weeks and triggers its exit clause if dispatch stays sub-90% through peak. Across four rounds you (1) DIAGNOSE the fracture — separating the operational symptom (dispatch collapse) from its justice-and-cooperation root cause, and naming the first behaviour you must model; (2) DESIGN the 6-week communication and fairness-signal plan — choosing honest communication over strategic silence and allocating a finite set of high-visibility fairness moves across two distrustful legacies; (3) EXECUTE the 70-role redundancy and MODEL behaviour under fire — designing a fair process with employee voice, deciding what you personally model (deliver the news directly or delegate, share the pain or protect your perks, apply criteria evenly or protect 'your own'), and responding in real time to a mid-round injection (a rumour the cuts fall on the south, a walkout threat, a star dispatcher resigning); and (4) RECOVER cooperation and set the new norm against the day-one baseline. The math is grounded in Melkonian's research on exemplarity and organizational justice: it rewards naming the justice root cause, procedural and interactional fairness over generous-but-unfair outcomes, consistent exemplary behaviour, and even-handedness across legacies — and it measurably punishes the five classic errors: an operations-only response (more supervisors and overtime), strategic silence, outcome-over-process severance, inconsistent exemplarity, and favouring one legacy. Final KPIs track Cooperation Index, Perceived Fairness, Change Adoption, and Turnover Risk versus baseline, plus the on-time dispatch rate against the 95% client commitment.