Business Analysis of FMC Corporation's Green River Facility FMC Corporation’s Green River facility is a large organization with many different product lines that cater to many different customers. The industry it serves is the chemical industry. With over 1,000 employees, they service over 100 customers with several different product lines. The Aberdeen facility on the other hand, has only 100 employees who service to only one customer with a single product. The Aberdeen facility, although small in numbers, has proven to be successful in growth and organizational effectiveness to the point that the Green River facility is interested in its organizational behaviors to incorporate them into their own facility. The Aberdeen facility was founded on the beliefs of participative management and empowerment (George & Jones, 2005) to its employees. The basic principle behind the success of this idea is trust. According to Bob Lancaster, the founder to Aberdeen’s management system, trust eliminates fear and allows employees to really focus on what is needed to be done as well as getting it done. By organizing self managed teams (George & Jones, 2005) along with a team leader, employees are encouraged to manage many different aspects of their own organizational behavior. Employee selection is a rigorous process designed to attract people with not only technical skills, which is minor determining factor based on the philosophy that technical skills were easily trained, but a range of : personal skills, group skills, communication skills, problem solving skills, results orientation, and leadership skills (Clawson, 2005). These employees would have to be able to thrive in the environment were they are not needed to be told what to do, but to just do it. Teams are designed to manage virtually every aspect of the plant. They schedule work hours, purchased materials and tools, planned work schedules, coordinated with other teams, evaluated team members performances, recommended salary increases, generate reports, and deal with virtually every problem that arises (Clawson, 2005). This is where trust is displayed. These teams are comparable to a family. Each person depends on each other to get jobs done within the team. They openly communicate and have meetings when necessary to discuss and resolve issues as they arise. There is no communication gap betwee... ... middle of paper ... ...ith responsibility and would rather just take orders from someone else. This attitude will not work with this system. Implementing this system may take some time to accomplish due to the size of the Green River facility, but the system is possible to achieve at this facility. The reason the Aberdeen facility has prospered is simply that the employees feel that their part is truly essential to the functioning of the facility, and that makes them feel good about their job and they are constantly seeking ways to improve their team’s production. Once all of the teams are in place and employees are put with the product specialized for them, the ball will get rolling. Slowly but surely things that need to be corrected will be done, employees that can not conform to the new responsibilities will be eliminated, and employees will start to feel the job satisfaction that is really the driving force behind this system. References: Jennifer M. George & Gareth R. Jones (2005). Understanding and Managing Organizational Behavior. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall James G. Clawson (2005) Custom Business Resources. FMC Aberdeen. Boston, MA: Pearson Custom Publishing
There is also no form of standardized training throughout the organization. Employee morale and employee relations are lower than should be expected, due to miscommunication and lack of an established strategy. There is an absence of consistency in various ways regarding branding and identity as well. No two stores appear to be alike, names vary and locations are unpredictable. Customers also complain that the menus are inconsistent. It is also evident that reliable communication is lacking. For example, GC3 has customer comment cards, but, as the case study explained, GC3 management is not sure if they are being reviewed or taken into consideration. More so, GC3 remains unclear if they are considered one company, or three separate companies. GC3’s product portfolio is becoming stagnant, and there is an apparent need to refresh the menu and align it with their competitors. Profits are falling behind, and there is nothing in place to enable GC3 to understand what products and what stores need to be evaluated. Lastly, GC3 management is becoming disgruntled. This aggravation is evident within the Pittsburgh locations. Due to this insubordinate behavior, corporate culture in the Columbus locations has started to
...ities. On the other hand, they can compensate for the shortfall with aggressive recognition programs. It appears that they recognize this shortcoming as they are engaged in developing a viable recognition program. How successful this program will be in fostering a comprehensive team approach and creating job satisfaction remains to be seen.
Robbins , Stephen P. and Judge, Timothy, A. Organizational Behavior. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey. Prentice Hall. Pearson Custom Publishing. 2008 Print
Each plant comprises a number of small; multi-skilled; flexible; collaborative and self-managed teams instead of functional departments with specialised functions (e.g. legal, finance or human resources etc as in a conventional system). These teams have the decision-making power over all plant-specific business functions including capital allocation, expenditures, strategic planning and plant design. This bottom-up decision making process emphasises the trust the company places in its employees and is very effective in decentralizing the power base, consequently, involving every employee in being responsible for the performance of the company not just the CEO.
Second, team members must appreciate one another’s perspectives and refrain from blaming one another for problems they may encounter. Before Jimenez’s team-based productivity project, the engineers and the operations workers at the Wichita site neither understood nor appreciated the other side’s contributions. Jimenez and Keller set up the monthly meetings to discuss problems and resolve them. That was an excellent mechanism for providing information on the different contributions and challenges of the various camps. Moreover, their active intervention during those meetings helped stop the blaming. Finally team members must create shared views of problems and shared approaches for resolving them. Those commonalities must be acceptable to everyone if they are to provide the core for new ways of doing things. The monthly problem chats represented the beginning of process if developing acceptable approaches. The company softball games provided a powerful way for the brains and the brawn to develop a shared picture if their plant and its goals, as well as to get to know individuals from the other side and to appreciate their perspectives.
Kreitner, R., & Kinicki, A., (2004). Organizational Behavior (6th ed.). New York: McGraw- Hill/Irwin. pp. 406- 441.
Kinicki, A., & Kreitner, R. (2009). Organizational behavior: Key concepts, skills and best practices (customized 4th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Irwin.
RL Wolfe decided to try the SHRM through self-driven teams. In the past, the company had highly unionized stru...
A team is a group of people who work in tandem to achieve a common outcome (Chatfield, 2011). A common type of team found in the workplace is self-managed teams (SMT). A self-managed team empowers employees to manage the day to day functions, operations, and tasks of a specific job area with little or no supervisory oversight or intervention. In other words, it is a self-contained unit (Williams, 2011). For example, self-managed teams handle work direction, job assignments, trouble-shoot problems, and handle all of the decision making aspects of the job (Silverman,1996). Moreover, companies that have used SMTs report an increase in productivity and quality, increased employee morale, creativity, job satisfaction, and a decrease in absenteeism (Silverman, 1996). Also, a 1990 study by Cohen (1993) found that forty-seven percent of Fortune 1000 companies used SMTs with some of their workforce. In two years the number of SMTs increased to sixty percent. Thus, the prevalence of SMTs in organizations can be contributed to its tangible outcomes.
Osland, J. S., Kolb, D. A., Rubin, I. M., & Turner, M. E. (Eds.). (2007). The organizational behavior: An experiential approach (8th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.
Robbins, S. P., & Judge, T. A. (2011). Organizational behavior (14 ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.
For managers, the key issue regarding ability is to ensure that employees have the abilities they need to perform their jobs effectively. There are three ways to manage ability in organizations to ensure this happens; selection, placement, and training. (George & Jones, 2005)
Employee empowerment can be described as giving employees' accountability and ability to make choices about their work without managerial authorization. Good managers are expected to assist employees to improve job success by supporting, training, leading and giving advice. Employee empowerment can increase employees' motivation, job satisfaction, and loyalty to their companies. The power that managers comprise should now be shared with employees with confidence, assertion, inspiration, and support. Work decisions and the ability to control an individual’s amount of work are now being relied upon at lower-level management positions (Fragoso, 1999). Groups of empowered employees with little or no supervision are now being formed and these groups are being called self-managed teams. These groups can now solve work problems, make choices on schedules and operations, learn to do other employees’ jobs, and are held accountable for the quality of their finished products.
A work team will be defined for the purposes of this paper by a definition borrowed from Bateman and Snell (2004). A team is formed of people (usually a small number) with complementary skills who trust one another and are committed to a common purpose, common performance goals, and a common approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable. Teams generally see themselves and are seen by others as a social entity, which is interdependent because of the tasks performed as members of a group.
Organizations use teamwork because it increases productivity. This concept was used in corporations as early as the 1920s, but it has become increasingly important in recent years as employ...