Pike River Disaster

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Management today is an essential part in ensuring the success of the organisation on the whole. Without proper management, many unexpected and unfavourable events can take place, and jeopardise the stability of the organisation. For my research, I have chosen to use the article titled “Managing Motivation: Incentive Pay and the Pike River disaster” as I felt the Pike River disaster had a lot of impact on the society, not only when it happened, but also after it happened, when investigations were in place. Also it was one of the worst disasters in New Zealand’s history, with 29 deaths, which made it appear on the front page of international news outlets (Evans 2010). Also, this incident had highlighted many management lapses that led to the fateful event.

The Pike River disaster was a process safety accident due to to leadership, operational and cultural problems in the organisation. Pike River Coal Company Limited (Pike) was a publicly listed company, in the oil and gas industry, formed in 1982 and acquired by New Zealand Oil and Gas in 1998 (Royal Commission on the Pike River Coal Mine Tragedy 2012). It has now been been placed under receivership with PricewaterhouseCoopers due to debt and the tragic incident at the Pike River Mine, as of December 2010. At time of writing, Pike still is under receivership with the receivers mentioned (PricewaterhouseCoopers 2010).

There were a number of issues that lead to the unfaithful event. The Pike saga began when Pike had decided to develop a mining site at Pike River, in 2005. The mine was completely new and had not been developed before. The company had only one mine, and that was the only source of income for the company. Development of the mine had become more difficult than expected...

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...u.au/lib/uow/docDetail.action?p00=organisational+politics&docID=10415261&page=211.
Thompson, P & Mchugh, D 2002, Work organisations: A critical introduction, 3rd edn, MacMillan Palgrave, New York, viewed 4 April 2014, http://site.ebrary.com.ezproxy.uow.edu.au/lib/uow/docDetail.action?docID=10038997&p00=organisational+behaviour.
Waddell, D, Jones, G & George, J 2014, Contemporary Management, 3rd edn, McGraw Hill Education, Sydney, pp 211.
Zanko, M & Dawson, P 2012, ‘Occupational health and safety management in organizations: A review’, International Journal of Management Reviews, vol. 14, no. 3, p 328-344, viewed 2 April 2014, http://ro.uow.edu.au/commpapers/2832/.
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