Frustrated by this seeming lethargy and beginning to doubt the much-touted Japanese efficiency, Oats got right to the point. He made an oral presentation of his proposal, waiting patiently for the translation of each sentence. Then he handed the leader of the Japanese delegation a packet containing the specifics of his proposal, got up, and left. The translator trailed behind him as if wanting to drag out the process even further. By the end of their first week, both Oats and his wife were frustrated. Oats’s office phone had not rung once, which did not make him optimistic about his meeting with another top company the following week. Carol could scarcely contain her irritation with what she had perceived of the Japanese way of life. She had been sure that a well-respected U.S. lawyer would have little trouble securing a job with a Japanese multinational corporation, but the executives she had met with seemed insulted that she was asking them for a job. And the way they treated their secretaries! After only a week in Japan, both Carol and Warren Oats were ready to go home. A month later, their perspective had changed radically, and both looked back on those first meetings with embarrassment. Within that month, they had learned a lot about the Japanese sense of protocol and attitudes toward women. Warren Oats believed he was beginning to get the knack of doing business with the Japanese in their manner: establishing a relationship slowly, almost ritualistically, waiting through a number of meetings before bringing up the real business at hand, and then doing so circumspectly. It was difficult for Oats to slow his pace, and it made him nervous to be so indirect, but he was beginning to see some value in the sometimes humbling learning process he was going through. Perhaps, he thought, he and Carol could become consultants for other executives who needed to learn the lessons he was beginning to understand. Case Questions 1- What specific errors did Warren and Carol Oats make during their first week in Japan? 2- If you were talking to a non-U.S. businessperson making a first contact with an American company, what advice would you give? 4- Group Dynamics A Difficult Task Force José has been appointed chair of a steering task force to design the primary product line for a new joint venture between companies from Japan, the United States, and South America. The new joint venture company will make, sell, and service pet caskets (coffins) for the burial of beloved pets, mostly dogs and cats. One month earlier, each company had assigned personnel to the task force: From the Japanese company, Furuay Masahiko from Yokohama, assistant to the president of the Japanese company; Hamada Isao from Tokyo, director of marketing from its technology group; and Noto Takeshi from Tokyo, assistant director of its financial management department. From the United States company, Thomas Boone from Chicago, the top purchasing manager from its lumber and forest lands group; Richard Maret from Buffalo, the codirector of the company’s information systems group; and Billy Bob “Tex” Johnson from Arizona, the former CEO, now retired and a consultant for the company. From the South American company, Mariana Preus from Argentina, the head of product design for that company’s specialty animal products group; Hector Bonilla from their Mexico City division, an expert in automated systems design for wood products; and Mauricio Gomes, in charge of design and construction for the plant, which will be located in southern Chile to take advantage of the vast forest there. These members were chosen for their expertise in various areas and were taking valuable time away from their normal assignments to participate in the joint venture. As chair of the task force, José had scheduled an initial meeting for 10:00 A.M. José started the meeting by reviewing the history of the development of the joint venture and how the three company presidents had decided to create it. Then, José reviewed the market for the new high-end, designer pet coffins, stressing that this task force was to develop the initial design parameters for the new product to meet increasing demand around the world. He then opened the meeting for comments and suggestions. Mariana Preus spoke first: “In my opinion, the current designs that we have in production in our Argentina plant are just fine. They are topnotch designs, using the latest technology for processing. They use the best woods available and they should sell great. I don’t see why we have to design a whole new product line.” Noto Takeshi agreed and urged the committee to recommend that the current designs were good enough and should be immediately incorporated into the plans for the new manufacturing plant. José interrupted the discussion: “Look, the council of presidents put this joint venture together to completely revolutionize the product and its manufacture based on solid evidence and industry data. We are to redesign the product and its manufacturing systems. That is our job, so let’s get started.” José knew that the presidents had considered using existing designs but had rejected the idea because the designs were too old and not easily manufacturable at costs low enough to make a significant impact on the market. He told the group this and reminded them that the purpose of the committee was to design a new product. The members then began discussing possible new design elements, but the discussion always returned to the benefits of using the existing designs. Finally, Tex spoke up: “I think we ought to do what Mariana suggested earlier. It makes no sense to me to design new caskets when the existing designs are good enough to do the job.” The others nodded their heads in agreement. José again reminded them of the task force’s purpose and said such a recommendation would not be well received by the council of presidents. Nevertheless, the group insisted that José write a memo to the council of presidents with the recommendation to use existing designs and to begin immediately to design the plant and the manufacturing system. The meeting adjourned and the members headed to the golf course at 10:45 A.M. José returned to his computer and started to write the memo, but he knew it would anger the presidents. He hoped he would not be held responsible for the actions of the task force, even though he was its chair. He wondered what had gone wrong and what he could have done to prevent it. Case Questions 1- Which characteristics of group behavior discussed in the chapter can you identify in this case? 2- How did the diverse nature of the group affect the committee’s actions? 3- If you were in Jose’s position, what would you have done differently? What would you do now? 4- Using Teams in Organization Teams at Evans RV Wholesale Supply and Distribution Company? Evans RV Wholesale Supply and Distribution Company sells parts, equipment, and supplies for recreational vehicles-motor homes, travel trailers, campers, and similar vehicles. In addition, Evans has a service department for the repair and service of RVs. The owner, Alex Evans, bought the company five years ago from its original owner, changed the name of the company, and has finally made it profitable, although it has been rough going. The organization is set up in three divisions: service, retail parts and supplies, and wholesale parts and supplies. Alex, the owner, CEO, and president, has a vice president for each operating division and a vice president of finance and operations. The organization chart shows these divisions and positions. In the warehouse there are three groups: receiving (checking orders for completeness, returning defective merchandise, stocking the shelves, filling orders), service parts, and order filling for outgoing shipments. The warehouse group is responsible for all activities related to parts and supplies receiving, storage, and shipping. The retail sales division includes all functions related to selling of parts and supplies at the two stores and in the mobile sales trailer. Personnel in the retail division includ
e salespeople and cashiers. The retail salespeople also work in the warehouse because the warehouse also serves as the showroom for walk-in customers. In the service department the service manager supervises the service writers, one scheduler, and lead mechanics and technicians. The service department includes the collision repair group at the main store and the service department at the satellite store. The collision repair group has two service writers who have special expertise in collision repair and insurance regulations. Two drivers who move RVs around the “yard” also work in the service division. The accounting and finance groups do everything related to the money side of the business, including accounts payable and receivable, cash management, and payroll. Also in this group is the one person who handles all of the traditional personnel functions. Alex has run other small businesses and is known as a benevolent owner, always taking care of the loyal employees who work hard and are the backbone of any small business. He is also known as being real tough on anyone who loafs on the job or tries to take unfair advantage of Alex or the company. Most of the employees are either veterans of the RV industry at Evans or elsewhere, or are very young and still learning the business. Alex is working hard to develop a good work ethic among the younger employees and to keep the old-timers fully involved. Since he bought the business, Alex has instituted new, modern, employee-centered human resource policies. However, the company is still a traditional hierarchically structured organization. The company is located in a major metropolitan area that has a lot of potential customers for the RV business. The region has many outdoor recreational activities and an active retirement community that either lives in RVs (motor homes, trailers, or mobile homes) or uses them for recreation. The former owner of the business specifically chose not to be in the RV sales business, figuring that parts and service was the better end of the business. Two stores are strategically located on opposite ends of the metropolitan area, and a mobile sales office is moved around the major camping and recreational areas during the peak months of the year. When Alex bought the company, the parts and supplies business was only retail, relying on customers to walk in the door to buy something. After buying the business, Alex applied good management, marketing, and cash-management principles to get the company out of the red and into profitability. Although his was not the only such business in town, it was the only one locally owned, and it had a good local following. About two years ago, Alex recognized that the nature of the business was changing. First, he saw the large nationwide retailers moving into town. These retailers were using discount pricing in large warehouse-type stores. These large retail stores could use volume purchasing to get lower prices from manufacturers, and they had the large stores necessary to store and shelve the large inventory. Alex, with only two stores, was unable to get such low prices from manufacturers. He also noted that retired people were notorious for shopping around for the lowest prices, but they also appreciated good, friendly customer service. People interested in recreational items also seemed to be following the national trend to shop via catalogs. So for a variety of reasons Alex began to develop a wholesale business by becoming a wholesale distributor to the many RV parts and supply businesses in the small towns located in the recreational areas around that state and in surrounding states. At the same time, he created the first catalog for RV parts and supplies, featuring all the brand-name parts and supplies by category and supplier. The catalog had a very attractive camping scene on the cover, a combination of attractively displayed items and many pages full of all the possible parts and supplies that the RV owner could think of. Of course, he made placing an order very easy, by phone, mail, or fax, and accepted many easy payment methods. He filled both distributor orders and catalog orders from his warehouse in the main store using standard mail and parcel delivery services, charging the full delivery costs to the customers. He credits the business’s survival so far to his diversification into the warehouse and catalog business through which he could directly compete with the national chains. Although it is now barely profitable, Alex is concerned about the changes in the industry and the competition and about making the monthly payments on the $5 million loan he got from the bank to buy the business in the first place. In addition, he reads about the latest management techniques and attends various professional conferences around the country. He has been hearing and reading about this team-based organization idea and thinks it might be just the thing to energize his company and take it to the next level of performance and profitability. At the annual strategic planning retreat in August, Alex announced to his top management team that starting on October 1 (the beginning of the next fiscal year), the company would be changing to a team-based arrangement. Case Questions 1- What mistakes has Alex already made in developing a team-based organization? 2- If Alex were to call you in as a consultant, what would you tell him to do? 3- Using the organization chart of Evans RV Wholesale Supply and Distribution, describe how you would put the employees together in teams. 5- Leadership Models and Concepts Right Boss, Wrong Company Betty Kesmer was continuously on top of things. In school, she had always been at the top of her class. When she went to work for her uncle’s shoe business, Fancy Footwear, she had been singled out as the most productive employee and the one with the best attendance. The company was so impressed with her that it sent her to get an M.B.A. to groom her for a top management position. In school again, and with three years of practical experience to draw on, Kesmer had gobbled up every idea put in front of her, relating many of them to her work at Fancy Footwear. When Kesmer graduated at the top of her class, she returned to Fancy Footwear. To no one’s surprise, when the head of the company’s largest division took advantage of the firm’s early retirement plan, Kesmer was given his position. Kesmer knew the pitfalls of being suddenly catapulted to a leadership position, and she was determined to avoid them. In business school, she had read cases about family businesses that fell apart when a young family member took over with an iron fist, barking out orders, cutting personnel, and destroying morale. Kesmer knew a lot about participative management, and she was not going to be labeled an arrogant know-it-all. Kesmer’s predecessor, Max Worthy, had run the division from an office at the top of the building, far above the factory floor. Two or three times a day, Worthy would summon a messenger or a secretary from the offices on the second floor and send a memo out to one or another group of workers. But as Kesmer saw it, Worthy was mostly an absentee autocrat, making all the decisions from above and spending most of his time at extended lunches with his friends from the Elks Club. Kesmer’s first move was to change all that. She set up her office on the second floor. From her always-open doorway she could see down onto the factory floor, and as she sat behind her desk she could spot anyone walking by in the hall. She never ate lunch herself but spent the time from 11 to 2 down on the floor, walking around, talking, and organizing groups. The workers, many of whom had twenty years of seniority at the plant, seemed surprised by this new policy and reluctant to volunteer for any groups. But in fairly short order, Kesmer established a worker productivity group, a “Suggestion of the Week” committee, an environmental group, a worker award group, and a management relations group. Each group held two meetings a week, one without and one with Kesmer. She encouraged each group to set up goals in its particular focu
s area and develop plans for reaching those goals. She promised any support that was within her power to give. The group work was agonizingly slow at first. But Kesmer had been well trained as a facilitator, and she soon took on that role in their meetings, writing down ideas on a big board, organizing them, and later communicating them in notices to other employees. She got everyone to call her “Betty” and set herself the task of learning all their names. By the end of the first month, Fancy Footwear was stirred up. But as it turned out, that was the last thing most employees wanted. The truthfinally hit Kesmer when the entire management relations committee resigned at the start of their fourth meeting. “I’m sorry, Ms. Kesmer,” one of them said. “We’re good at making shoes, but not at this management stuff. A lot of us are heading toward retirement. We don’t want to be supervisors.” Astonished, Kesmer went to talk to the workers with whom she believed she had built good relations. Yes, they reluctantly told her, all these changes did make them uneasy. They liked her, and they didn’t want to complain. But given the choice, they would rather go back to the way Mr. Worthy had run things. They never saw Mr. Worthy much, but he never got in their hair. He did his work, whatever that was, and they did theirs. “After you’ve been in a place doing one thing for so long,” one worker concluded, “the last thing you want to do is learn a new way of doing it.” Case Questions 1- What factors should have alerted Kesmer to the problems that eventually came up at Fancy Footwear? 2- Could Kesmer have instituted her changes without eliciting a negative reaction from the workers? If so, how? 3- 6- Leadership and Influence Processes The Struggle for Power at Ramsey Electronics A vice president’s position is about to open up at Ramsey Electronics, maker of components for audio and visual equipment and computers. Whoever fills the position will be one of the four most powerful people in the company and may one day become its CEO. So the whole company has been watching the political skirmishes among the three leading candidates: Arnie Sander, Laura Prove, and Billy Evans. Arnie Sander, currently head of the research and development division, worked his way up through the engineering ranks. Of the three candidates, he alone has a Ph.D. (in electrical engineering from MIT), and he is the acknowledged genius behind the company’s most innovative products. One of the current vice presidents—Harley Learner, himself an engineer— has been pushing hard for Sander’s case. Laura Prove spent five years on the road, earning a reputation as an outstanding salesperson of Ramsey products before coming to company headquarters and working her way up through the sales division. She knows only enough about what she calls the “guts” of Ramsey’s electronic parts to get by, but she is very good at selling them and at motivating the people who work for her. Frank Barnwood, another current vice president, has been filling the Chief’s ear with praise for Prove. Of the three candidates, Billy Evans is the youngest and has the least experience at Ramsey. Like the Chief, he has an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School and a very sharp mind for finances. The Chief has credited him with turning the company’s financial situation around, although others in the company believe Sander’s products or Prove’s selling ability really deserves the credit. Evans has no particular champion among Ramsey’s top executives, but he is the only other handball player the Chief has located in the company, and the two play every Tuesday and Thursday after work. Learner and Barnwood have noticed that the company’s financial decisions often get made during the cooling-off period following a handball game. In the month preceding the Chief’s decision, the two vice presidents have been busy. Learner, head of a national engineering association, worked to have Sander win an achievement award from the association, and two weeks before the naming of the new vice president, he threw the most lavish banquet in the company’s history to announce the award. When introducing Sander, Learner made a long, impassioned speech detailing Sander’s accomplishments and heralding him as “the future of Ramsey Electronics.” Frank Barnwood has moved more slowly and subtly. The Chief had asked Barnwood years before to keep him updated on “all these gripes by women and minorities and such,” and Barnwood did so by giving the Chief articles of particular interest. Recently he gave the Chief one from a psychology magazine about the cloning effect—the tendency of powerful executives to choose successors who are most like themselves. He also passed on to the Chief a Fortune article arguing that many American corporations are floundering because they are being run by financial people rather than by people who really know the company’s business. He also flooded bulletin boards and the Chief’s desk with news clippings about the value of having women and minorities at the top levels of a company. Billy Evans has seemed indifferent to the promotion. He spends his days on the phone and in front of the computer screen, reporting to the Chief every other week on the company’s latest financial successes—and never missing a handball game. Case Questions 1- Whom do you think the Chief will pick as the new vice president? Why? 2- Whom do you think should get the job? Why? 3- What role might impression management play in the decision? 7- Decision Making and Negotiation A Big Step for Peak Electronics Lynda Murray, chief executive officer of Peak Electronics, faced a difficult decision. Her company was a leader in making parts for standard cassette and reel-to-reel tape recorders. Murray had watched with some misgivings as digital technology hit the market in the form of compact disc players, and she had to decide whether to lead Peak into the digital age. Even though digital tape players were encountering legal hurdles in the American market, they were starting to take hold in Japan and Europe. Was America— and Peak—ready for them? Murray had plenty of help in making the decision. First she met with the company’s marketing division. Everyone had an opinion. Some predicted that every audio component would be digital by the turn of the century; others believed the popularity of even compact disc players was already waning. Everyone agreed that they needed time to conduct surveys, gather data, and find out what products the public really wanted and how much they would be willing to pay for them. The people in research and development had a different approach. They were tired of making small improvements in a mature and perfected product. They had been reading technical material about digital tape, and they saw it as an exciting new technology that would give an innovative company a chance to make it big. Time was of the essence, they insisted. If Peak was to become an important supplier of parts for the new decks, it had to have the components ready. Delay would be fatal to the product. A meeting of the vice presidents produced a scenario with which Murray was all too familiar. Years ago these executives had discovered that they could not outargue one another in these meetings, but they had faith in their staffs’ abilities to succeed where they had failed. Before Murray even walked into the room, she knew what their recommendation would be: to create a committee of representatives from each division and let them thoroughly investigate all aspects of the decision. Such an approach had worked before, but Murray was not sure it was right this time. Desperate to make the decision and get it out of her mind, Murray mentioned it to her fifteen-year-old son, who, it turned out, knew everything about digital tape. In fact, he told her, one of his friend—the rich one—had been holding off on buying a new tape deck so that he would be on the cutting edge of digital recording. “It’s gotta happen, Mom,” her son said. “People want it.” Intellectually, Murray believed he was right. The past thirty years had shown
that Americans had an insatiable appetite for electronic gadgets and marvels. Quadraphonic sound and video discs were the only exceptions she could think of to the rule that if someone invented an improved way of reproducing images or sound, someone else would want to buy it. But intuitively, Murray was not so sure. She had a bad feeling about the new technology. She believed the record companies, which had lost the battle to tape manufacturers, might get together with compact disc makers and audio equipment manufacturers to stop the digital technology from entering the American market. So far, no American company had invested substantially in the technology, so no one had an interest in funding the legal battle to remove the barriers to the new machines. Exhausted, Murray went to bed. She hoped that somehow her subconscious mind would sort out all the important factors and she would wake up knowing the right decision. Case Questions 1- What sources of information and opinion about the new technology seem most reliable? Which would you ignore? 2- If you were Murray, what would your next step be? 8- Dimensions of Organization Structure Changing the Rules at Cosmo Plastics When Alice Thornton took over as chief executive officer at Cosmo Plastics, the company was in trouble. Cosmo had started out as an innovative company, known for creating a new product just as the popularity of one of the industry’s old standbys was fading, i.e., replacing yo-yo’s with water guns. In two decades, it had become an established maker of plastics for the toy industry. Cosmo had grown from a dozen employees to four hundred, and its rules had grown haphazardly with it. Thornton’s predecessor, Willard P. Blatz, had found the company’s procedures chaotic and had instituted a uniform set of rules for all employees. Since then, both research output and manufacturing productivity had steadily declined. When the company’s board of directors hired Thornton, they emphasized the need to evaluate and revise the company’s formal procedures in an attempt to reverse the trends. First, Thornton studied the rules Blatz had implemented. She was impressed to find that the entire procedures manual was only twenty pages long. It began with the reasonable sentence “All employees of Cosmo Plastics shall be governed by the following . . .” Thornton had expected to find evidence that Blatz had been a tyrant who ran the company with an iron fist. But as she read through the manual, she found nothing to indicate this. In fact, some of the rules were rather flexible. Employees could punch in anytime between 8:00 and 10:00 a.m. and leave nine hours later, between 5:00 and 7:00 p.m. Managers were expected to keep monthly notes on the people working for them and make yearly recommendations to the human resources committee about raises, bonuses, promotions, and firings. Except for their one-hour lunch break, which they could take at any time, employees were expected to be in the building at all times. Puzzled, Thornton went down to the lounge where the research and development people gathered. She was surprised to find a time clock on the wall. Curious, she fed a time card into it and was even more flabbergasted when the machine chattered noisily, then spit it out without registering the time. Apparently R&D was none too pleased with the time clock and had found a way to rig it. When Thornton looked up in astonishment, only two of the twelve employees who had been in the room were still there. They said the others had “punched back in” when they saw the boss coming. Thornton asked the remaining pair to tell her what was wrong with company rules, and she got an earful. The researchers, mostly chemists and engineers with advanced graduate degrees, resented punching a time clock and having their work evaluated once a month, when they could not reasonably be expected to come up with something new and worth writing about more than twice a year. Before the implementation of the new rules, they had often gotten inspiration from going down to the local dime store and picking up five dollars worth of cheap toys, but now they felt they could make such trips only on their own time. And when a researcher came up with an innovative idea, it often took months for the proposal to work its way up the company hierarchy to the attention of someone who could put it into production. In short, all these sharp minds felt shackled. Concluding that maybe she had overlooked the rigidity of the rules, Thornton walked over to the manufacturing building to talk to the production supervisors. They responded to her questions with one word: anarchy. With employees drifting in between 8:00 and 10:00 and then starting to drift out again by 11:00 for lunch, the supervisors never knew if they had enough people to run a particular operation. Employee turnover was high, but not high enough in some cases; supervisors believed the rules prevented them from firing all but the most incompetent workers before the end of the yearly evaluation period. The rules were so “humane” that discipline was impossible to enforce. By the time Alice Thornton got back to her office, she had a plan. The following week, she called in all the department managers and asked them to draft formal rules and procedures for their individual areas. She told them she did not intend to lose control of the company, but she wanted to see if they could improve productivity and morale by creating formal procedures for their individual departments. Case Questions 1- Do you think Alice Thornton’s proposal to decentralize the rules and procedures of Cosmo Plastics will work? 2- What kinds of rules and procedures do you think the department managers will come up with? Which departments will be more formalized? Why? 3- What risks will the company face if it establishes different procedures for different areas? 9- Organization Culture Surviving Plant World’s Hard Times In ten years, Plant World had grown from a one-person venture into the largest nursery and landscaping business in its area. Its founder, Myta Ong, combined a lifelong interest in plants with a botany degree to provide a unique customer service. Ong had managed the company’s growth so that even with twenty full-time employees working in six to eight crews, the organization culture was still as open, friendly, and personal as it had been when her only “employees” were friends who would volunteer to help her move a heavy tree. To maintain that atmosphere, Ong involved herself increasingly with people and less with plants as the company grew. With hundreds of customers and scores of jobs at any one time, she could no longer say without hesitation whether she had a dozen arborvitae bushes in stock or when Mrs. Carnack’s estate would need a new load of bark mulch. But she knew when Rose had been up all night with her baby, when Gary was likely to be late because he had driven to see his sick father over the weekend, and how to deal with Ellen when she was depressed because of her boyfriend’s behavior. She kept track of the birthdays of every employee and even those of their children. She was up every morning by five-thirty arranging schedules so that John could get his son out of daycare at four o’clock and Martina could be back in town for her afternoon high school equivalency classes. Paying all this attention to employees may have led Ong to make a single bad business decision that almost destroyed the company. She provided extensive landscaping to a new mall on credit, and when the mall never opened and its owners went bankrupt, Plant World found itself in deep trouble. The company had virtually no cash and had to pay off the bills for the mall plants, most of which were not even salvageable. One Friday, Ong called a meeting with her employees and leveled with them: either they would not get paid for a month or Plant World would fold. The news hit the employees hard. Many counted on the Friday paycheck to buy groceries for the week. The local unemployment rate was low, however, and they knew they could find other jobs. But as they looked around, they wondered whether they co
uld ever find this kind of job. Sure, the pay was not the greatest, but the tears in the eyes of some workers were not over pay or personal hardship; they were for Ong, her dream, and her difficulties. They never thought of her as the boss or called her anything but “Myta.” And leaving the group would not be just a matter of saying good-bye to fellow employees. If Bernice left, the company softball team would lose its best pitcher, and the Sunday game was the height of everyone’s week. Where else would they find people who spent much of the weekend working on the best puns with which to assail one another on Monday morning? At how many offices would everyone show up twenty minutes before starting time just to catch up with friends on other crews? What other boss would really understand when you simply said, “I don’t have a doctor’s appointment, I just need the afternoon off”? Ong gave her employees the weekend to think over their decision: whether to take their pay and look for another job or to dig into their savings and go on working. Knowing it would be hard for them to quit, she told them they did not have to face her on Monday; if they did not show up, she would send them their checks. But when she arrived at sevenforty Monday morning, she found the entire group already there, ready to work even harder to pull the company through. They were even trying to top one another with puns about being “mall-contents.” Case Questions 1- How would you describe the organization culture at Plant World? 2- How large can such a company get before it needs to change its culture and structure? 10- Organization Change and Development Spooked by Computers The New England Arts Project had its headquarters above an Italian restaurant in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The project had five full-time employees, and during busy times of the year, particularly the month before Christmas, it hired as many as six parttime workers to type, address envelopes, and send out mailings. Although each of the five full-timers had a title and a formal job description, an observer would have had trouble telling their positions apart. Suzanne Clammer, for instance, was the executive director, the head of the office, but she could be found typing or licking envelopes just as often as Martin Welk, who had been working for less than a year as office coordinator, the lowest position in the project’s hierarchy. Despite a constant sense of being a month behind, the office ran relatively smoothly. No outsider would have had a prayer of finding a mailing list or a budget in the office, but project employees knew where almost everything was, and after a quiet fall they did not mind having their small space packed with workers in November. But a number of the federal funding agencies on which the project relied began to grumble about the cost of the part-time workers, the amount of time the project spent handling routine paperwork, and the chaotic condition of its financial records. The pressure to make a radical change was on. Finally Martin Welk said it: “Maybe we should get a computer.” To Welk, fresh out of college, where he had written his papers on a word processor, computers were just another tool to make a job easier. But his belief was not shared by the others in the office, the youngest of whom had fifteen years more seniority than he. A computer would eat the project’s mailing list, they said, destroying any chance of raising funds for the year. It would send the wrong things to the wrong people, insulting them and convincing them that the project had become another faceless organization that did not care. They swapped horror stories about computers that had charged them thousands of dollars for purchases they had never made or had assigned the same airplane seat to five people. “We’ll lose all control,” Suzanne Clammer complained. She saw some kind of office automation as inevitable, yet she kept thinking she would probably quit before it came about. She liked hand-addressing mailings to arts patrons whom she had met, and she felt sure that the recipients contributed more because they recognized her neat blue printing. She remembered the agonies of typing class in high school and believed she was too old to take on something new and bound to be much more confusing. Two other employees, with whom she had worked for a decade, called her after work to ask if the prospect of a computer in the office meant they should be looking for other jobs. “I have enough trouble with English grammar,” one of them wailed. “I’ll never be able to learn computer language.” One morning Clammer called Martin Welk into her office, shut the door, and asked him if he could recommend any computer consultants. She had read an article that explained how a company could waste thousands of dollars by adopting integrated office automation in the wrong way, and she figured the project would have to hire somebody for at least six months to get the new machines working and to teach the staff how to use them. Welk was pleased because Clammer evidently had accepted the idea of a computer in the office. But he also realized that as the resident authority on computers, he had a lot of work to do before they went shopping for machines. Case Questions 1- Is organization development appropriate in this situation? Why or why not? 2- What kinds of resistance to change have the employees of the project displayed? 3- What can Martin Welk do to overcome the resistance? 11- Organization Design A Structural Strait jacket at Wild Wear Wild Wear makes clothing, rain gear, and sleeping bags for hikers and other outdoor enthusiasts. The company began when Myrtle Kelly began sewing pile jackets that her husband Ray sold on college campuses. It now employs almost five hundred people organized into traditional divisions such as marketing, manufacturing, and research and development. Recently it became apparent that although Wild Wear’s balance sheet appeared healthy, the company was stagnant. Everyone seemed to work hard, and the company’s products seldom flopped. Yet Wild Wear seemed to have developed a “me too” posture, bringing new products to market a season or a full year after competitors. The Kellys, who still run the company, pored over performance appraisals looking for the weak points that might be holding the company back. But it seemed that the human resources department had been doing its work. R&D was coming up with a respectable number of new products, the manufacturing facility was modern and efficient, and the marketing tactics often won praise from customers. Baffled, the Kellys called a meeting of middle-level managers, hoping they could provide some answers they had missed. They were shocked when they noticed that the managers were introducing themselves as they came in and sat down. People who had been working in the same company for years had never even met! The meeting began with this observation, and for ninety minutes the Kellys sat back and listened to the problems their managers raised. It became clear that in the attempt to grow from a family operation into a larger company, the Kellys had assumed the two needed to be very different. When they started out, the two of them handled all aspects of the business. Ray would hear from a customer that backpackers really needed a certain product. He would pass the idea on to Myrtle and order the materials she needed, and within a few weeks he would offer the product to the delighted customer. As the company grew, the Kellys began to worry about their lack of formal business training and hired professionals to run each division and set up appropriate rules and procedures. What they had created, the middle managers informed them, was a number of very efficient, productive divisions that might as well have been separate companies. The R&D people might come up with a new breathable fabric for rain gear, only to find that production had just begun making a new rainwear line out of the old fabric and that marketing was turning all its attention to selling the big inventory of sleeping bags. Each division did the best it could with the inf
ormation it had, but that information was very incomplete. Products progressed linearly from one division to the next, but it always seemed as though an idea that had been ahead of its time did not yield a product until the time had passed. To remedy the problem, the Kellys decided to call in a management consultant to create more of a matrix structure for Wild Wear. While they were waiting for the consultant’s solutions, they began holding weekly “horizon” meetings. The group of middle managers would get together every Monday and discuss what they saw on their horizon. After less than a month of such meetings, the excitement generated promised better things for Wild Wear as the managers stretched to expand their own horizons and to help others bring their ideas to light. Case Questions 1- What would be the ideal organizational design for a company like Wild Wear? 2- What does Wild Wear’s experience say about the need for periodic corporate restructuring? 12- Managing Stress and the Work-Life Balance Stress Takes Its Toll Larry Field had a lot of fun in high school. He was a fairly good student, especially in math, he worked harder than most of his friends, and somehow he ended up going steady with Alice Shiflette, class valedictorian. He worked summers for a local surveyor, William Loude, and when he graduated Mr. Loude offered him a job as number-three man on one of his survey crews. The pay wasn’t very high, but Larry already was good at the work, and he believed all he needed was a steady job to boost his confidence to ask Alice to marry him. Once he did, events unfolded rapidly. He started work in June, he and Alice were married in October, Alice took a job as a secretary in a local company that made business forms, and a year later they had their first child. The baby came as something of a shock to Larry. He had come to enjoy the independence his own paycheck gave him every week. Food and rent took up most of it, but he still enjoyed playing basketball a few nights a week with his high school buddies and spending Sunday afternoons on the softball field. When the baby came, however, Larry’s brow began to furrow a bit. He was only 20 years old, and he still wasn’t making much money. He asked Mr. Loude for a raise and got it—his first. Two months later, one of the crew chiefs quit just when Mr. Loude’s crews had more work than they could handle. Mr. Loude hated to turn down work, so he made Larry Field a crew chief, giving his crew some of the old instruments that weren’t good enough for the precision work of the top crews, and assigned him the easy title surveys in town. Because it meant a jump in salary, Larry had no choice but to accept the crew chief position. But it scared him. He had never been very ambitious or curious, so he’d paid little attention to the training of his former crew chief. He knew how to run the instruments—the basics, anyway—but every morning he woke up terrified that he would be sent on a job he couldn’t handle. During his first few months as a crew chief, Larry began doing things that his wife thought he had outgrown. He frequently talked so fast that he would stumble over his own words, stammer, turn red in the face, and have to start all over again. He began smoking, too, something he had not done since they had started dating. He told his two crew members that smoking kept his hands from shaking when he was working on an instrument. Neither of them smoked, and when Larry began lighting up in the truck while they were waiting for the rain to stop, they would become resentful and complain that he had no right to ruin their lungs too. Larry found it particularly hard to adjust to being “boss,” especially since one of his workers was getting an engineering degree at night school and both crew members were the same age as he. He felt sure that Alfonso Reyes, the scholar, would take over his position in no time. He kept feeling that Alfonso was looking over his shoulder and began snapping any time they worked close together. Things were getting tense at home, too. Alice had to give up her full-time day job to take care of the baby, so she had started working nights. They hardly ever saw each other, and it seemed as though her only topic of conversation was how they should move to California or Alaska, where she had heard that surveyors were paid five times what Larry made. Larry knew his wife was dissatisfied with her work and believed her intelligence was being wasted, but he didn’t know what he could do about it. He was disconcerted when he realized that drinking and worrying about the next day at work while sitting at home with the baby at night had become a pattern. Case Questions 1- What signs of stress was Larry Field exhibiting? 2- How was Larry Field trying to cope with his stress? Can you suggest more effective methods? 13- Communication in Organizations Heading Off a Permanent Misunderstanding Mindy Martin was no longer speaking to Al Sharp. She had been wary of him since her first day at Alton Products; he had always seemeddistant and aloof. She thought at first that he resented her MBA degree, her fast rise in the company, or her sense of purpose and ambition. But she was determined to get along with everyone in the office, so she had taken him out to lunch, praised his work whenever she could, and even kept track of his son’s Little League feats. But all that ended with the appointment of the new Midwest marketing director. Martin had had her sights on the job and thought her chances were good. She was competing with three other managers on her level. Sharp was not in the running because he did not have a graduate degree, but his voice was thought to carry a lot of weight with the top brass. Martin had less seniority than any of her competitors, but her division had become the leader in the company, and upper management had praised her lavishly. She believed that with a good recommendation from Sharp, she would get the job. But Walt Murdoch received the promotion and moved to Topeka. Martin was devastated. It was bad enough that she did not get the promotion, but she could not stand the fact that Murdoch had been chosen. She and Al Sharp had taken to calling Murdoch “Mr. Intolerable” because neither of them could stand his pompous arrogance. She felt that his being chosen was an insult to her; it made her rethink her entire career. When the grapevine confirmed her suspicion that Al Sharp had strongly influenced the decision, she determined to reduce her interaction with Sharp to a bare minimum. Relations in the office were very chilly for almost a month. Sharp soon gave up trying to get back in Martin’s favor, and they began communicating only in short, unsigned memos. Finally, William Attridge, their immediate boss, could tolerate the hostility no longer and called the two in for a meeting. “We’re going to sit here until you two become friends again,” he said, “or at least until I find out what’s bugging you.” Martin resisted for a few minutes, denying that anything had changed in their relationship, but when she saw that Attridge was serious, she finally said, “Al seems more interested in dealing with Walter Murdoch.” Sharp’s jaw dropped; he sputtered but could not say anything. Attridge came to the rescue. “Walter’s been safely kicked upstairs, thanks in part to Al, and neither of you will have to deal with him in the future. But if you’re upset about that promotion, you should know that Al had nothing but praise for you and kept pointing out how this division would suffer if we buried you in Topeka. With your bonuses, you’re still making as much as Murdoch. If your work here continues to be outstanding, you’ll be headed for a much better place than Topeka.” Embarrassed, Martin looked at Sharp, who shrugged and said, “You want to go get some coffee?” Over coffee, Martin told Sharp what she had been thinking for the past month and apologized for treating him unfairly. Sharp explained that what she saw as aloofness was actually respect and something akin to fear: He viewed her as brilliant and efficient. Consequently, he was very cautious, trying not
to offend her. The next day, the office was almost back to normal. But a new ritual had been established: Martin and Sharp took a coffee break together every day at ten. Soon their teasing and friendly competition loosened up everyone they worked with. Case Questions 1- What might have happened had William Attridge not intervened? 2- Are the sources of misunderstanding between Martin and Sharp common or unusual? 14- Job Design, Employee Participation, and Alternative Work Arrangements Enriching Jobs at Standard Decoy Standard Decoy in Witchell, Maine, has been making traditional wooden hunting decoys since 1927. Cyrus Witchell began the business by carving a couple of ducks a day by hand. Demand and competition have long since driven the company to use modern machinery and assembly-line techniques, and they now turn out two hundred ducks daily even on the slowest days. When Stewart Alcorn, Cyrus Witchell’s grandson, took over the business, he knew things needed to change. Output hadn’t fallen, and the company was surviving financially despite competition from what he called “plastic ducks” from the Far East. But Alcorn noticed that productivity per worker had stayed the same for ten years, even during the period since the company had bought the latest equipment. While touring the plant, he noticed many employees yawning, and he found himself doing the same. No one quit. No one complained. They all gave him a smile when he walked by. But no one seemed excited with the work. Alcorn decided to take a survey. He appointed a respected worker at each step in the production process to ask each of his or her coworkers questions and to fill in the response sheets. One conclusion emerged from the survey: The “fine-tuners,” as Alcorn thought of them, were the most content. That is, those who used fine tools and brushes to get the ducks’ heads, expressions, and feathers just right seemed to enjoy their work most. In contrast, the people who planed and cut the wood into blocks, rough-cut the body shapes, spray-painted the body color, and applied the varnish were all pretty bored. Alcorn had heard about a technique called “job rotation” and decided to try it out. He gave all workers a taste of the “fun” jobs. He asked for volunteers to exchange jobs for one morning a week. The fine-tuners were skeptical, and the other workers were only slightly more enthusiastic. The whole program turned out to be a disaster. Even with guidance, the planers and spray-painters could not master the higher-precision techniques, and the fine-tuners seemed willing to give them only limited assistance. After one trial week, Alcorn gave up. During a lunch break that Friday, Alcorn was wandering around outside the plant bemoaning his failure. Then he noticed one of the rough-cutters, Al Price, whittling at something with an ordinary pocket knife. It turned out to be a block of wood that he had cut incorrectly and normally would have thrown in the scrap heap. But as Price said, “It kind of looked like a duck, in an odd way,” and he had started whittling on it in spare moments. Alcorn liked what he saw and asked Price if he would be willing to sell him the duck when he got through with it. Price looked surprised, but he agreed. The following week, Alcorn noticed that Price had finished the whittling and was getting one of the finetuners to help him paint the duck in a way that made it look even odder. When it was finished, Alcorn offered it to one of his regular customers, who took a look at it and said, “You’ve got hand made?” and asked if he could order a gross. By the middle of the next month, Alcorn’s “Odd Ducks” program was in full swing. Workers were still responsible for producing the usual number of conventional ducks, but they were allowed to use company tools and materials any time they wanted to work on their own projects. There were no quotas or expectations for the Odd Ducks. Some employees worked on one for weeks; others collaborated and produced one or two a day. Some wouldn’t sell their ducks but crafted them to practice their skills and brought them home to display on their mantels. Those who would sell them kept half the selling price. That price usually did not amount to more than their regular hourly wage, but no one seemed to care about the precise amount of income. The response to the Odd Duck program was so great that Alcorn put up a bulletin board he called “Odd Letters” as a place to post appreciative notes from customers. Most of these customers, it seemed, had no interest in hunting but just liked to have the ducks around. And when Alcorn learned that some of his customers were in turn selling the ducks as “Cyrus Witchell’s Olde Time Odd Ducks,” he did not complain. Case Questions 1- How did the “Odd Ducks” program enrich the jobs at Standard Decoy? 2- What motivated workers to participate in making the Odd Ducks? 15- Goal Setting, Performance Management, and Rewards No More Dawdling Over Dishes Andy Davis was proud of his restaurant, The Golden Bow. Its location was perfect, its decor tasteful, its clientele generous and distinguished. When he first took over the business a year ago, Davis had worried that the local labor shortage might make it difficult to hire good workers. But he had made some contacts at a local college and hired a group of servers who worked well with customers and with one another. The only problem he still had not solved was the dishwasher. At first Davis felt lucky when he found Eddie Munz, a local high school dropout who had some experience washing dishes. Davis could not afford to pay a dishwasher more than $4 an hour, but Eddie did not seem to mind that. Moreover, Eddie seemed to get the dishes clean. But he was so slow! Davis originally thought Eddie just was not quick about anything, but he changed his mind as he observed his behavior in the kitchen. Eddie loved to talk to the cooks, often turning his back on the dishes for minutes at a time to chitchat. He also nibbled desserts off of dirty plates and sprayed the servers with water whenever they got near him. The kitchen was always a mess, and so many dishes piled up that often two hours after closing time, when everything else was ready for the next clay, Eddie would still be scraping and squirting and talking. Davis began to wonder if there was a method to Eddie’s madness: He was getting paid by the hour, so why should he work faster? But Davis did not like having a constantly sloppy kitchen, so he determined to have a talk with Eddie. Davis figured out that Eddie had been making $28 on his reasonably efficient nights and then met with Eddie and made him a proposal. First he asked Eddie how soon he thought he could finish after the last customer left. Eddie said an hour and a quarter. When Davis asked if he would be interested in getting off forty-five minutes earlier than he had been, Eddie seemed excited. And when he offered to pay Eddie the $28 for a complete job every night, regardless of when he finished, Eddie could hardly contain himself. It turned out he did not like to work until 2:00 a.m., but he needed every dollar he could get. The next week, a new chalkboard appeared next to the kitchen door leading out to the dining room. On top it read, “Eddie’s Goal for a Record Time.” By the end of the first week, Davis had printed on the bottom “l.” Davis began inspecting the dishes more often than usual, but he found no decrease in the quality of Eddie’s work. So on Sunday, he said to Eddie, “Let’s try for an hour.” A month later, the board read “42 minutes.” The situation in the kitchen had changed radically. The former “Eddie the Slob” had become “Eddie the Perfectionist.” His area was spotless, he was often waiting when someone came from the dining room with a stack of dirty plates, and he took it as a personal affront if anyone found a spot on a plate he had washed. Instead of complaining about Eddie squirting them, the servers kidded him about what a worker he had become, and they stacked the plates and separated the silver to help him break his record. And the first time Eddie got done at 12:42, they all went out for an hour on the tow
n together. Case Questions What did Andy Davis do to change Eddie’s behavior? Which elements of total quality management and performance management did Andy Davis use? Could Davis have used a different system of rewards to get the same results from Eddie Munz? 16- Need-Based Perspectives on Motivation More Than a Paycheck Lemuel Greene was a trainer for National Home Manufacturers, a large builder of prefabricated homes. National Home had hired Greene fresh from graduate school with a master’s degree in English. At first, the company put him to work writing and revising company brochures and helping with the most important correspondence at the senior level. But soon, both Greene and senior management officials began to notice how well he worked with executives on their writing, how he made them feel more confident about it, and how, after working with an executive on a report, the executive often was much more eager to take on the next writing task. So National Home moved Greene into its prestigious training department. The company’s trainers worked with thousands of supervisors, managers, and executives, helping them learn everything from new computer languages to time management skills to how to get the most out of the workers on the plant floor, many of whom were unmotivated high school dropouts. Soon Greene was spending all his time giving short seminars on executive writing as well as coaching his students to perfect their memos and letters. Greene’s move into training meant a big increase in salary, and when he started working exclusively with the company’s top brass, it seemed as though he got a bonus every month. Greene’s supervisor, Mirela Albert, knew he was making more than many executives who had been with the company three times as long, and probably twice as much as any of his graduate school classmates who concentrated in English. Yet in her biweekly meetings with him, she could tell that Greene wasn’t happy. When Albert asked him about it, Greene replied that he was in a bit of a rut. He had to keep saying the same things over and over in his seminars, and business memos weren’t as interesting as the literature he had been trained on. But then, after trailing off for a moment, he blurted out, “They don’t need me!” Since the memos filtering down through the company were now flawlessly polished, and the annual report was 20 percent shorter but said everything it needed to, Greene’s desire to be needed was not fulfilled. The next week, Greene came to Albert with a proposal: What if he started holding classes for some of the floor workers, many of whom had no future within or outside the company because many could write nothing but their own names? Albert took the idea to her superiors. They told her that they wouldn’t oppose it, but Greene couldn’t possibly keep drawing such a high salary if he worked with people whose contribution to the company was compensated at minimum wage. Greene agreed to a reduced salary and began offering English classes on the factory floor, which were billed by management (who hoped to avoid a wage hike that year) as an added benefit of the job. At first only two or three workers showed up—and they, Greene believed, only wanted an excuse to get away from the nailing guns for awhile. But gradually word got around that Greene was serious about what he was doing and didn’t treat the workers like kids in a remedial class. At the end of the year, Greene got a bonus from a new source: the vice president in charge of production. Although Greene’s course took workers off the job for a couple of hours a week, productivity had actually improved since his course began, employee turnover had dropped, and for the first time in over a year, some of the floor workers had begun to apply for supervisory positions. Greene was pleased with the bonus, but when Albert saw him grinning as he walked around the building, she knew he wasn’t thinking about his bank account. Case Questions 1- What need theories would explain why Lemuel Greene was unhappy despite his high income? 2- Greene seems to have drifted into being a teacher. Given his needs and motivations, do you think teaching is an appropriate profession for him? 17- Process-Based Perspectives on Motivation Equity in Academia When the last student left Melinda Wilkerson’s office at 5:30 p.m., the young English Professor just sat, too exhausted to move. Her desk was piled high with student papers, journals, and recommendation forms. “There goes my weekend,” she thought to herself, knowing that just reading and commenting on the thirty journals would take up all of Saturday. She liked reading the journals, getting a glimpse of how her students were reacting to the novels and poems she had them read, watching them grow and change. But recently, as she picked up another journal from the bottomless pile or greeted another student with a smile, she often wondered whether it was all worth it. Wilkerson had had such a moment about an hour earlier, when Ron Agua, whose office was across the hall, had waved to her as he walked past her door. “I’m off to the Rat,” he announced. “Come join us if you ever get free.” For a moment Wilkerson had stared blankly at the student before her, pondering the scene at the Rathskeller, the university’s most popular restaurant and meeting place. Agua would be there with four or five of the department’s senior members, including Alice Bordy, the department chair. All would be glad to have her join them . . . if only she didn’t have so much work. At the start of her first year as an assistant professor, Wilkerson had accepted her overwhelming workload as part of the territory. Her paycheck was smaller and her hours longer than she had expected, but Agua and the other two new faculty members seemed to be suffering under the same burdens. But now, in her second semester, Wilkerson was beginning to feel that things weren’t right. The stream of students knocking on her door persisted, but she noticed that Agua was spending less time talking and more time at his word processor than he had during the first semester. When asked, Agua told her he had reduced his course load because of his extra work on the department’s hiring and library committees. He seemed surprised when Wilkerson admitted that she didn’t know there was such a thing as a course reduction. As the semester progressed, Wilkerson realized there was a lot she didn’t know about the way the department functioned. Agua would disappear once a week or so to give talks to groups around the state and then would turn those talks into papers for scholarly journals—something Wilkerson couldn’t dream of having time to do. She and Agua were still good friends, but she began to see differences in their approaches. “I cut down my office hours this semester,” he told her one day. “With all those students around all the time, I just never had a chance to get my work done.” Wilkerson had pondered that statement for a few weeks. She thought that dealing with students was “getting work done.” But when salaries for the following year were announced, she realized what Agua meant. He would be making almost $1,000 more than she; the human resources committee viewed his committee work as a valuable asset to the department, his talks around the state had already earned him notoriety, and his three upcoming publications clearly put him ahead of the other first-year professors. Wilkerson was confused. Agua hadn’t done anything sneaky or immoral—in fact, everything he did was admirable, things she would have liked to do. His trips to the Rat gave him the inside scoop on what to do and whom to talk to, but she couldn’t blame him for that either. She could have done exactly the same thing. They worked equally hard, she thought. Yet Agua already was the highly paid star, whereas she was just another overworked instructor. As she began piling all the books, papers, and journals into her bag, Wilkerson thought about what she could do. She could quit and go somewhere else where she might be more appreciated, but jobs were hard to find and she suspected that
the same thing might happen there. She could charge sex discrimination and demand to be paid as much as Agua, but that would be unfair to him and she didn’t really feel discriminated against for being a woman. The university simply didn’t value what she did with her time as highly as it valued what Agua did with his. Putting on her coat, Wilkerson spotted a piece of paper that had dropped out of one of the journals. She picked it up and saw it was a note from Wendy Martin, one of her freshman students. “Professor Wilkerson,” it read, “I just wanted to thank you for taking the time to talk to me last week. I really needed to talk to someone experienced about it, and all my other professors are men, and I just couldn’t have talked to them. You helped me a whole lot.” Sighing, Wilkerson folded the note, put it in her bag, and closed her office door. Suddenly the pile of journals and the $1,000 didn’t seem so important. Case Questions 1- What do you think Melinda Wilkerson will do? Is she satisfied with the way she is being treated? 2- Explain the behaviors of Wilkerson and Agua using the motivation theories? 18- Foundations of Individual Behavior Differing Perceptions at Clarkston Industries Susan Harrington continued to drum her fingers on her desk. She had a real problem and wasn’t sure what to do next. She had a lot of confidence in Jack Reed, but she suspected she was about the last person in the office who did. Perhaps if she ran through the entire story again in her mind she would see the solution. Susan had been distribution manager for Clarkston Industries for almost twenty years. An early brush with the law and a short stay in prison had made her realize the importance of honesty and hard work. Henry Clarkston had given her a chance despite her record, and Susan had made the most of it. She now was one of the most respected managers in the company. Few people knew her background. Susan had hired Jack Reed fresh out of prison six months ago. Susan understood how Jack felt when Jack tried to explain his past and asked for another chance. Susan decided to give him that chance just as Henry Clarkston had given her one. Jack eagerly accepted a job on the loading docks and could soon load a truck as fast as anyone in the crew. Things had gone well at first. Everyone seemed to like Jack, and he made several new friends. Susan had been vaguely disturbed about two months ago, however, when another dock worker reported his wallet missing. She confronted Jack about this and was reassured when Jack understood her concern and earnestly but calmly asserted his innocence. Susan was especially relieved when the wallet was found a few days later. The events of last week, however, had caused serious trouble. First, a new personnel clerk had come across records about Jack’s past while updating employee files. Assuming that the information was common knowledge, the clerk had mentioned to several employees what a good thing it was to give exconvicts like Jack a chance. The next day, someone in bookkeeping discovered some money missing from petty cash. Another worker claimed to have seen Jack in the area around the office strongbox, which was open during working hours, earlier that same day. Most people assumed Jack was the thief. Even the worker whose wallet had been misplaced suggested that perhaps Jack had indeed stolen it but had returned it when questioned. Several employees had approached Susan and requested that Jack be fired. Meanwhile, when Susan had discussed the problem with Jack, Jack had been defensive and sullen and said little about the petty-cash situation other than to deny stealing the money. To her dismay, Susan found that rethinking the story did little to solve his problem. Should she fire Jack? The evidence, of course, was purely circumstantial, yet everybody else seemed to see things quite clearly. Susan feared that if she did not fire Jack, she would lose everyone’s trust and that some people might even begin to question her own motives. Case Questions 1- Explain the events in this case in terms of perception and attitudes. Does personality play a role? 2- What should Susan do? Should she fire Jack or give him another chance? 19-CASE STUDY: APPLYING MOTIVATION THEORIES You are in-charge of a small department and have three subordinates – Yogesh, Pawan and Kapil. The key to the success of your department is to keep these employees as motivated as possible. Here is a brief summary profile on each of these subordinates. Yogesh is the type of employee who is hard to figure out. His absenteeism record is much higher than average. He greatly enjoys his family and thinks they should be central to his life. He believes in hippie culture. As a result, the things that the company can offer him really inspire him very little. He feels that the job is simply a means of financing his family‘s basic needs and little else. Overall, Yogesh does adequate job and is very conscientious, but all attempts to get him to do more have failed. He has charm and his friendly, but he meets the minimal standards of performance. Pawan is in many aspects different form Yogesh. Like Yogesh, he is a likeable guy, but unlike Yogesh, Pawan responds well to the company‘s rules and compensation schemes and has a high degree of personal loyalty to the company. The problem with Pawan is that he will not do very much independently. He does well with what is assigned to him, but he is not very creative. He is also a shy person who is not very assertive when dealing with people outside the department. This impacts his performance to certain extent because he cannot immediately sell himself to other departments of company as well to top management. Kapil, on the other hand, is a very assertive person. He will work for money and would readily change jobs for more money. He really works hard for the company but expects the company also tow work for him. In his present job, he feels no qualms about working a 60-hour week, if the money is there. Even though he has a family and is supporting his elder father, he once quit a job when his employer didn‘t give him a raise on the basis that he was already making too much. He is quite a driver. A manager at his last place of employment indicated that, although Kapil did do an excellent job for the company, his personality was so intense that they were glad to get rid of him. His former boss noted that Kapil just seemed to be pushing all he time. If it wasn‘t for more money, it was for better fringe benefits; he never seemed satisfied. Questions Q.1 Explain Yogesh, Pawan & Kapil motivations by using one or more motivation theories? Q.2 Who does perceive money as being a direct reward and motivation for performance? Q.3 How does the equity theory applicable on the motivation levels of Yogesh, Pawan and Kapil? 20-Case study: APPLYING MOTIVATION THEORIES Dr. Alok Banarjee is the Chief Executive of a medium sized pharmaceutical firm in Kolkata. He holds a Ph.D. in pharmacy. However, he has not been involved in research and development of new products for two decades. Though turnover is not a problem for the company, Dr. Banarjee and his senior colleagues noticed that the workers on hourly basis are not working upto their full potontial. It is a well-known fact that they filled their days with unnecessary and unproductive activities and worked only for the sake of a pay cheque. In the recent past the situation has become quite alarming as the organisation began to crumble under the weight of uneconomical effort. The situation demanded immediate managerial attention and prompt remedial measures. Dr. Banarjee knew very well that the only way to progress and prosper is to motivate workers to peak performance through various incentive plans. One fine morning, Dr. Banarjee contacted the Personnel Manager and enquired: ―What is the problem with the workers on hourly basis? The wage bill shows that we pay them the highest in the industry. Our working conditions are fine. Our fringe benefits are excellent. Still these workers are not motivated. What do they require really? The Personnel Manager gave the following
reply: ―I have already informed you a number of times, that money, working conditions and benefits are not enough. Other things are equally important. One of the workers in that group recently gave me a clue as to why more and more workers arejoining the bandwagon of ‗non-performers‘. He felt bad that hard work and efficiency go unnoticed and unrewarded in our organisation. Our promotions and benefits plans are tied to length of service. Ecen the lazy workers, accordingly, enjoy all the benefits in the organisation, which infact, according to the workers, should go only to those who work hard‖. Dr. Banarjee then wanted the personnel manager to look into the problem more closely and find out a solution to the problems of workers on hourly basis. Questions: (i) Explain the motivational problem in this case. If you were the manager, how would you motivate the employees so that they work better? (ii) What would be your response to Banarjee‘s statement (In the last para of the case), if you were the Personnel Manager in the company. 21-Case Study Donnelly Mirrors, a small company employing about 750 workers, manufactures practically all of the rear-view mirrors for all of the automobiles produced in America. Even though, it is a privately held corporation, it has developed a participative management style where the workers are actively and genuinely involved in the government of the company. This may be one of the reasons why the company has been enjoying continuous success over the years. The participative system started in 1952 and initially, the employees simply participated in cost saving efforts and they shared those savings among themselves and with the company. The cost savings resulted from efficient use of labor, materials and machines. Employees were assured that they would not lose jobs because of introduction of technologically advanced machinery or change in production methods. The resulted in reduced resistance for change on the part of employees. The employees became so involved in cost reduction efforts and activities that they started to volunteer various ways of improving operational efficiency including selection of equipment and machines. Various problem solving groups were formed for various operational areas and in order to achieve efficient coordination amount all the groups and activities, a linkingpin organizational structure was adopted, whereby, members of various groups made decisions relative to their own tasks and these decisions are presented to the next higher level of management for consideration. There are no time clocks and even though workers get paid on a salary basis, their working times are not closely watched or scrutinized. There is sufficient group cohesion so that the workers do not take undue advantage of these relaxed rules. If a members is late or absent for a good reason, other workers in the group will cover his work. If some one misses work frequently, he becomes answerable to other group members. The group selects it own leader and together the members set their own production goals within the general framework of the objectives of the organization and are responsible for meeting such goals. The company has formed a committee comprised of representatives both from employees as well as management and the committee handles all personnel matters such as pay policies, fringe benefits and employee grievances. Since the workers are represented in this committee, all decisions made by this committee are easily accepted by all. Pay scales are also recommended to the management by this committee and these are consistent with the industry practices. As per pay policies, the company is guaranteed a return of 5.2% on its investment and the balance of the profits is shared with the employees. If a 5.2% return is not achieved in a given year, the deficit is compensated from the earning of the following year before any additional bonuses are given to the employees. Because of its reputation for employee treatment, it attracts a la rge number of applicants for jobs, but because the turnover rate is very low, the company can select the best from this pool of applicant. The company is like a close knit family and enjoys a reputation for productivity, quality and employee loyalty and dedication. Questions: 1. Does the success of the company reflect a general statement that profit sharing and employee involvement in company affairs is highly motivating for employing? Explain you reasons is detail. 2. How do you think that the group dynamics is at work in this organization? How are the group integrated with the organization goals? 22- Case Study Gulu’s Snack Company is a family owned company located in Himalya Mountains. Gulu started the business in 195 Is, by selling homemade chips. Nowadays, Gulu’s is Rs.58 million snack Food Company” that is struggling to regain market share lost to fierce competitors. In the early 180, Gulu passed the business on to his son, Gulu Jr., who is currently grooming his son, Gulshan to succeed himself as head of the company. Six month ago, Gulshan joined Gulu’s Snacks as a salesperson and after four months, he was quickly promoted to sales manager. Gulshan recently graduated from a local university with an M.B.A. in marketing, and Gulu Jr. was hoping that Gulshan would be able to implement strategies that could help turn the company around. One of Gulshan’s initial strategies was to introduce a new sales performance management system. As part of this approach, any sales person who receives a below average performance rating would be required to attend a mandatory coaching session with his/her supervisor. Gulshan is hoping that these coaching sessions will motivate his employees in increase their sales. Here is the description of the reaction of three salespeople who have been required to attend a coaching session because of their low performance over the previous quarter. Nishant. Nishant is a hard worker. He takes pride in his work. He has learned selling techniques. He has accompanied top salesman. He has no problem asking for advice and doing whatever needs to be done to learn the business. He has cheery attitude and is a real “team player and giving the company 150 percent at all times. It has been a tough quarter for Nishant, but he is doing his best to achieve his sales targets. He feels that failure to make quota during this past quarter results not from lack of effort but just bad luck in the economy.But he is now hopeful in the next quarter. Nishant is upset with Gulshan for having him attend the coaching session because this is the first time in three years that his sales quota haws not been met. He exceeded the sales quota this year yet had not received a “thank you” or “good job” for those efforts. The entire experience has left Nishant unmotivated the questioning his future with the company. Navin is happy to have his job at Gulu’s Snack company although he really doesn’t like sales work that much. Navin accepted this position because he felt that he wouldn’t have to work hard and would have a lot of free time during the day. Navin was sent to coaching mainly because his customer satisfaction reports were low; in fact they were the lowest in the company. Navin tends to give ‘canned presentations and does not listen closely to customers” needs. Consequently, Navin makes numerous errors is new sales orders, which delays shipments and loses business and goodwill for Gulu’s Snack Company. He thinks that the coaching session is a waste of time. He doesn’t socialize with others in the office. He attributes other’s success and promotions to “who they know” in the company rather than their hard work. He feels that no matter how much effort is put into the job, he will never be adequately rewarded. For three of the last five years Nikhil was the number one salesperson in the division and had hopes of being promoted to sales manager. When Gulshan joined the company, Nikhil worked closely with Gulu Jr. to help Gulshan leam all facets of the business. Nikhil thought this close relationship with Gulu Jr. would ensure his upcoming promotion to the coveted position of sal
es manager. He goes late for appointment or misses them entirely. His sales performance declined dramatically, which resulted in a drastic loss of income. Although Nikhil had been dedicated and fiercely loyal to Gulu Jr. and the company for many years, he is now looking for other employment. Nikhil is bitter and resentful of his current situation and now faces a mandatory coaching session that will be conducted by Gulshan. Questions: 1. You have met three employees of Gulu‘s Snacks. Explain how each employee‘s situation relates to equity theory. 2. How three needs identified by McClelland are related to worker behaviour in each situation? 3. How is expectancy theory related with the 3 employees? Explain. 23- Case Study A unique Training Program at UPS Mark Colvard, a United Parcel Manager in San Ramon, California, recently faced a difficult decision. One of his drivers asked for 2 week off to help an ailing family member. But company rules said this driver wasn’t eligible. If Colvard went by the book, the driver would probably take the days off anyway and be fired. On the other hand, Colvard chose to give the driver the time off. Although he took some heat for the decision, he also kept a valuable employee. Had Colvard been faced with this decision 6 months earlier, he says he would have gone the other way. What changed his thinking was a month he spent living in McAllen, Texas. It was part of a UPS management training experience called the Community Internship Program (CIP). During his month in McAllen, Colvard built housing for the poor, collected clothing for the Salvation Army, and worked in a drug rehab Center. Colvard gives the program credit for helping him empathize with employees facing crises back home. And he says that CIP has made him a better manager. “My goal was to make the numbers, and in some cases that meant not looking at the individual but looking at the bottom line. After that one month stay, I Immediately started reaching out to people in a different way.” CIP was established by UPS in the late 1960s to help open the eyes of the company’s predominantly white managers to the poverty and inequality in many cities. Today, the program takes 50 of the company’s most promising executives each summer and brings them to cities around the country. There they deal with a variety of problems from transportation to housing, education, and health care. The company’s goal is to awaken these managers to the challenges that many of their employees face, bridging the cultural divide that separates a white manager from an African American driver or an upper-income suburbanite from a worker raised in the rural South. Questions: 1. Do you think individuals can learn empathy from something like a 1-month CIP experience? Explain why or why not. 2. How could UPS’s CIP help the organization better manage work life conflicts? 3. How could UPS’s CIP help the Organization improve its response to diversity? 4. What negatives, if any can you envision resulting from CIP? 5. UPS has 2,400 managers. CIP includes only 50 each year. How can the program make a difference if it include only 2 percent of all managers? Does this suggest that the program is more public relations than management training? 6. How can UPS justify the cost of a program like CIP if competitors like FedEx, DHL, and the U.S. Postal Service don’t offer such programs? Does the program increase costs or reduce UPS profits? 24-Case Study GE’s Work-Out General Electric established its worked process in the early 1990s. it continues to be a mainstay in GE’s efforts to has also been adopted by such divers organizations as General Motors, Home Depot, Frito-Lay, L.L. Bean, Sears, IBM, and the World Bank. The impetus for the Work- Out was the belief by GE’s CEO that the company’s culture was too bureaucratic and slow to respond to change. He wanted to create a vehicle that would effectively engage and empower GE workers. Essentially, Work-Out brings together employees and managers from many different functions and levels within an organization for an informal 3-day meeting to discuss and solve problems that have been identified by employees or senior management. Set into small teams, people are encouraged to challenge prevailing assumptions about “the way we have always done things” and develop recommendations for significant improvements in organizational processes. The Work-Out teams then present their recommendations to a senior manager in a public gathering called a Town Meeting. At the town Meeting, the manager in charge oversees a discussion about the recommendation and then is required to make a yes-or-no decision on the spot. Only in unusual circumstances can a recommendation be tabled for further study. Recommendations that are accepted are assigned to managers who have volunteered to carry them out. Typically, a recommendation will move from inception in 90 days or less. The logic behind the Work-Out is to identify problems, stimulate divers input, and provide a mechanism for speedy decision and action. More recently GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt has extended the Work-Out concept to build capabilities in anticipating future technologies and engage in long range planning. GE wants all its managers to be adept at the kind of strategic thinking that most companies entrust only to senior management. For example, GE is offering managers new classes focused on learning how to create new lines of business. Questions: 1. What type of change process would you call this? Explain. 2. Why should it work? 3. What negative consequences do you think might result from this process? 4. Why so you think new GE CEO Jeff Immelt has revised the Work-Out concept?