Warren Oats was a highly successful employee for American Auto Suppliers, a Chicago-based company that makes original-equipment specialty parts for Ford, GM, and Chrysler. Because of his excellent performance as a maintenance engineer, Oats was promoted to a high executive position supervising a division of more than fifty staff distributed in different locations.
Oats was confused. He has tremendous experience as a an engineer but non as a manager, sitting in his office thinking about his new managerial responsibilities, he came to the conclusion that the key issue is the question of how to push the employees to work harder, increase their input and record new successes for him and the company.
Oats thought that what had helped him to be a successful employee and to get promoted is his way of doing things. So he determined to lead the staff to adopt that way. He started by introducing new rules and regulation that would change the culture of the division so that employees follow his steps in accomplishing their tasks. He announced new monetary incentives for more productivity. He re-designed the work flow, reformulated work groups, and changed a number of operational procedures. He also canceled the idea program that was going on because he believed that it is not needed as he had all the successful ideas that led him to his promotion.
With the desire to succeed, Oats instructed his first-line supervisors to monitor their employees and to eliminate all inactive time; in addition he asked them to identify those who would not be obedient to the new way of working. He also decided to cancel the previously scheduled monthly meeting with all the groups.
All in all, Oats thought, things should be going much better. Output should be up and that his approach should be resulting in much higher levels of productivity and profits and consequently an addition successful story for him as an employee.
But that was not happening. Oats sensed that people weren’t doing their best. Performance reports indicated that output was only marginally higher than it was before his appointment. But the Human resources department of the company started to notices that absenteeism and sick leaves rates gone up, turnover had increased substantially and recruitment, selection of new staff, and training costs had gone up as a result.
The management decided to deal with the situation and conducted an investigation.
Employee morale has dropped significantly, threatening to compromise the organization’s corporate culture. To ease these tensions, an email from CEO William DeWitt should be sent to all employees on Feb. 1, thanking them for their patience and updating them on the litigation results. On Feb. 9, a second email should highlight the changes that have been adopted to prevent similar incidents. These changes include outsourcing the master password list company and requiring employees to change their passwords quarterly.
CEO Richard Scrushy held executive meetings every Monday morning. He seized his underlings with a flamboyant, manipulative and harsh influence while he was the CEO of HealthSouth. In one meeting, Mr. Scrushy said “Shine a light on someone- it is funny how their numbers improve”. This is one example of his management technique; to induce fear in the executive team members to ensure they would fix the companies numbers in ways that Scrushy would approve. He paid his loyal subordinates well yet threatened critics with severe reprisals. (Jennings, 2012)
As a result of the ineffective communication system, Littleton faces a number of issues which ultimately has affected the bottom line of the company. Key challenges to note are low employee morale, low level of unity within the organization, poorly designed organizational structure and confusion in interpreting procedures and rules. Improving the accuracy and speed of the flow of communication should be an important first step in the resolution of the presented issues, thus allowing the organization to function more effectively and efficiently.
However, the organization was having issues a symptom of these issues was that they had a reputation of being too slow in making decisions another symptom was that their profit was less then what executives thought it should be. After he examined their organization as a system, he was able to determine the cause and it was that employees did not pay much attention to the internal processes of the organization. He determined that this was the cause of the company not producing the profit levels that it
Topic: The scenario is one of discord among the employees regarding morale, productivity, absenteeism and other factors that affect the profit margin. My charge is to restore a healthy work environment according to Maslow’s Hierarchy in memo form.
This method also empowered the employees giving them an opportunity to increase their skill levels and an opportuni...
1. Lack of clarity on what is expected from the employee. Many employees quit and then sue their employers, because of a lack of clarity of what is expected from the employee. Employee's seek legal advise when the hours, the pay, the tasks, or other terms are unclear. They apparently feel exploited when the scope of their duties exceeds the expectations that were established during the orientation.
As owners we are in charge of the management responsibilities, we think that it’s important to acknowledge the concerns of the employees and look at the situation from their point of view. We have noticed that thei...
Using the five tools: Fishbone, SWOT, PESTEL, Force-field and the Sociogram, the diagnostics reveal that the common issue amongst them was a lack of communication and clarity of what needed to be done. Internally, the organization needed to realign its mission, goals and values with its employees, as none of them understood what was required of them. It was very expensive to have the workers sitting around with no productivity when the managers had a meeting with each other (K. Vincent, personal communication notes, January 28, 2016). Each time there was miscommunication and clarification was required, there was room for mistakes and loss in productivity. The workers were dissatisfied and demotivated during the building process, as they did not feel respected in their roles. The workers were also unsure of their responsibilities, as the managers were unclear of the building process to begin with. The CEO only made decisions but
...o the job as the other previous CEO’s of this company except he was someone who wanted to focus on employment development.
CEO Johnston also has plans to bolster the company’s leadership with the best minds available and also use motivational techniques to invigorate his employees. These ideas show the character of the CEO in enhancing productivity from his work force.
Besides that, OB can serve managers, leaders and customers’ purposes. To begin with managers who have to expand their information about the attitude and group’s behavior to improve the organization work environment and to create a business plan to have a successful organization. First of all, managers can build a better workplace by recognizing the challenges that face any organizations because of some strategies that used in business environment. For example, one of the challenges are that having a cultural diversity in organization, so managers can build the organization with different cultures which help to encourage employee to do their job well and communicate with others in appropriate way. Secondly, managers can measure the effectiveness and efficiency; also, they can identify the strength and weakness of the organization. According to national institutes of health, Organizational effectiveness is about each individual doing everything they know how to do and doing it well (NIH, 2004). Moreover, OB offers ways that provide ways in how managers can trust their employees’ potential and using a reward system to enhance employees’ performance. OB is helping the managers on providing some strategies such as indentifying problems by searching and gathering information to have an accurate decision.
The continuing influence of the founders of the company, James Lincoln created the Advisory Board Committee which allowed them to meet twice in a monthly basis to discuss company operations. This was the beginning of a series of personnel innovative policies which helped the company to distinguish from its contemporaries. As the incentive management plan has been established,
The relationship between employer and employees plays a pivotal role in the performance of the organization. Employers and employees have certain responsibilities towards each other which facilitate a fair and productive workplace. Positive work relationships create a cooperative climate with effort towards the same goals. Conflict, on the other hand, is likely to divert attention away from organizational performance.