Case: Jeans Therapy – Levi’s Factory Workers Are Assigned To Teams

1. What went wrong with Levi’s move to teams in their plants?

Levi’s was too late in attending global competition. To catch the market, they had to

drastically redesign their strategy. But the major problem of Levi’s was doing nothing to

understand the human side of management change. Levi’s did not align the company’s

culture, values, people, and behaviors to encourage the desired outcome. Levi’s did not

capture value; responsible for designing, executing, and living with the changed

environment. Levi’s did not use creative means to maintain employees satisfied.

2. What could Levi’s have done differently to avert the problems?

I believe that if Levi’s had recognized the market demands the time it start to change and

designed a structure to adjust with the market, slowly, the impact on the workers would not

have being so drastic; since they couldn’t use a long term goal to establish the new strategy

and convince workers to participate on it. Levi’s could develop teams that understood how

to work together and how they would be able to lead their people and please their workers

with incentive plans. They also didn’t worry about keeping their industry’s unique values and

sense of individuality, and about creating a culture of loyalty and performance. Levi’s

leadership teams fail to plan for the human side of change. Levi’s should ”cultivate their

human resources through careful selection and training of the best and brightest

employees, implementing innovative team-based employee involvement programs,

developing genuinely participate management approaches, and continually retraining their

employees.”

3. Devise a team incentive plan that you think might work.

“Successful process improvement activities depend upon the active involvement of the