ST.

MARY’S UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES
CASE STUDIES IN MANAGING ORGANIZATION BEHAVIOR
PART I. INDIVIDUAL ASSIGNMENT

Case 1. Difficult Transitions 

Tony Stark had just finished his first week at Reece Enterprises and decided to drive upstate to
a small lakefront lodge for some fishing and relaxation. Tony had worked for the previous ten
years for the O’Grady Company, but O’Grady had been through some hard times of late and
had recently shut down several of its operating groups, including Tony’s, to cut costs.
Fortunately, Tony’s experience and recommendations had made finding another position fairly
easy. As he drove the interstate, he reflected on the past ten years and the apparent situation
at Reece. 

At O’Grady, things had been great. Tony had been part of the team from day one. The job had
met his personal goals and expectations perfectly, and Tony believed he had grown greatly as a
person. His work was appreciated and recognized; he had received three promotions and many
more pay increases. 

Tony had also liked the company itself. The firm was decentralized, allowing its managers
considerable autonomy and freedom. The corporate Culture was easygoing. Communication
was open. It seemed that everyone knew what was going on at all times, and if you didn’t know
about something, it was easy to find out. 

The people had been another plus. Tony and three other managers went to lunch often and
played golf every Saturday. They got along well both personally and professionally and truly
worked together as a team. Their boss had been very supportive, giving them the help they
needed but also staying out of the way and letting them work. 

When word about the shutdown came down, Tony was devastated. He was sure that nothing
could replace O’Grady. After the final closing was announced, he spent only a few weeks
looking around before he found a comparable position at Reece Enterprises. 

As Tony drove, he reflected that "comparable" probably was the wrong word. Indeed, Reece
and O’Grady were about as different as you could get. Top managers at Reece apparently didn’t
worry too much about who did a good job and who didn’t. They seemed to promote and
reward people based on how long they had been there and how well they played the never-
ending political games. 
Maybe this stemmed from the organization itself, Tony pondered. Reece was a bigger
organization than O’Grady and was structured much more bureaucratically. It seemed that no
one was allowed to make any sort of decision without getting three signatures from higher up.
Those signatures, though, were hard to get. All the top managers usually were too busy to see
anyone, and interoffice memos apparently had very low priority. 

Tony also had had some problems fitting in. His peers treated him with polite indifference. He
sensed that a couple of them resented that he, an outsider, had been brought right in at their
level after they had had to work themselves up the ladder. On Tuesday he had asked two
colleagues about playing golf. They had politely declined, saying that they did not play often.
But later in the week, he had overheard them making arrangements to play that very Saturday. 

It was at that point that Tony had decided to go fishing. As he steered his car off the interstate
to get gas, he wondered if perhaps he had made a mistake in accepting the Reece offer without
finding out more about what he was getting into. 

Case Questions 

1. Identify several concepts and characteristics from the field of organizational behavior
that this case illustrates.

2. What advice can you give Tony? How would this advice be supported or tempered by
behavioral concepts and processes?

3. Is it possible to find an "ideal" place to work? Explain.

Case 2. Humanized Robots?

Helen Bowers was stumped. Sitting in her office at the plant, she pondered the same questions
she had been facing for months: how to get her company’s employees to work harder and
produce more. No matter what she did, it didn’t seem to help much. 

Helen had inherited the business three years ago when her father, Jake Bowers, passed away
unexpectedly. Bowers Machine Parts was founded four decades ago by Jake and had grown
into a moderate-size corporation. Bowers makes replacement parts for large-scale
manufacturing machines such as lathes and mills. The firm is headquartered in Kansas City and
has three plants scattered throughout Missouri. 
Although Helen grew up in the family business, she never understood her father’s approach.
Jake had treated his employees like part of his family. In Helen’s view, however, he paid them
more than he had to, asked their advice far more often than he should have, and spent too
much time listening to their ideas and complaints. When Helen took over, she vowed to change
how things were done. In particular, she resolved to stop handling employees with kid gloves
and to treat them like what they were: the hired help. 

In addition to changing the way employees were treated, Helen had another goal for Bowers.
She wanted to meet the challenge of international competition. Japanese firms had moved
aggressively into the market for heavy industrial equipment. She saw this as both a threat and
an opportunity. On the one hand, if she could get a toehold as a parts supplier to these firms,
Bowers could grow rapidly. On the other, the lucrative parts market was also sure to attract
more Japanese competitors. Helen had to make sure that Bowers could compete effectively
with highly productive and profitable Japanese firms. 

From the day Helen took over, she practiced an altogether different philosophy to achieve her
goals. For one thing, she increased production quotas by 20 percent. She instructed her first-
line supervisors to crack down on employees and eliminate all idle time. She also decided to
shut down the company softball field her father had built. She thought the employees really
didn’t use it much, and she wanted the space for future expansion. 

Helen also announced that future contributions to the firm’s profit-sharing plan would be
phased out. Employees were paid enough, she believed, and all profits were the rightful
property of the owner—her. She also had private plans to cut future pay increases to bring
average wages down to where she thought they belonged. Finally, Helen changed a number of
operational procedures. In particular, she stopped asking other people for their advice. She
reasoned that she was the boss and knew what was best. If she asked for advice and then
didn’t take it, it would only stir up resentment. 

All in all, Helen thought, things should be going much better. Output should be up and costs
should be way down. Her strategy should be resulting in much higher levels of productivity and
profits. 

But that was not happening. Whenever Helen walked through one of the plants, she sensed
that people weren’t doing their best. Performance reports indicated that output was only
marginally higher than before but scrap rates had soared. Payroll costs were indeed lower, but
other personnel costs were up. It seemed that turnover had increased substantially and training
costs had gone up as a result. 

In desperation, Helen finally had hired a consultant. After carefully researching the history of
the organization and Helen’s recent changes, the consultant made some remarkable
suggestions. The bottom line, Helen felt, was that the consultant thought she should go back to
that "humanistic nonsense" her father had used. No matter how she turned it, though, she just
couldn’t see the wisdom in this. People worked to make a buck and didn’t want all that
participation stuff. 

Suddenly, Helen knew just what to do: She would announce that all employees who failed to
increase their productivity by 10 percent would suffer an equal pay cut. She sighed in relief,
feeling confident that she had finally figured out the answer. 

Case Questions 

1. How successful do you think Helen Bowers’s new plan will be?
2. What challenges does Helen confront?
3. If you were Helen’s consultant, what would you advise her to do?

3. Culture Shock

Warren Oats was a highly successful executive for American Auto Suppliers, a Chicago-based
company that makes original-equipment specialty parts for Ford, GM, and Chrysler. Rather than
retreat before the onslaught of Japanese automakers, AAS decided to counterattack and use its
reputation for quality and dependability to win over customers in Japan. Oats had started in the
company as an engineer and worked his way up to become one of a handful of senior managers
who had a shot at the next open vice-presidential position. He knew he needed to distinguish
himself somehow, so when he was given a chance to lead the AAS attack on the Japanese
market, he jumped at it. 

Oats knew he did not have time to learn Japanese, but he had heard that many Japanese
executives speak English, and the company would hire a translator anyway. The toughest part
about leaving the United States was persuading his wife, Carol, to take an eighteen-month
leave from her career as an attorney with a prestigious Chicago law firm. Carol finally persuaded
herself that she did not want to miss an opportunity to learn a new culture. So, armed with all
the information they could gather about Japan from their local library, the Oats headed for
Tokyo. 

Known as an energetic, aggressive salesperson back home, Warren Oats wasted little time
getting started. As soon as his office had a telephone—and well before all his files had arrived
from the States—Oats made an appointment to meet with executives of one of Japan’s leading
automakers. Oats reasoned that if he was going to overcome the famous Japanese resistance to
foreign companies, he should get started as soon as possible. 

Oats felt very uncomfortable at that first meeting. He got the feeling that the Japanese
executives were waiting for something. It seemed that everyone but Oats was in slow motion.
The Japanese did not speak English well and appeared grateful for the presence of the
interpreter, but even the interpreter seemed to take her time in translating each phrase.
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?

Case 4. 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 ex-convicts 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?
Case 5. 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?

Case 6. 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 - GROUP 4, SECTION ‘A’

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 in this
chapter.

Case. 7 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 fine-tuners 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

 How did the "Odd Ducks" program enrich the jobs at Standard Decoy?
 What motivated workers to participate in making the Odd Ducks?
Case 8. 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 town together. 

Case Questions

1. What did Andy Davis do to change Eddie’s behavior?

2. Which elements of total quality management and performance management did Andy
Davis use?
3. Could Davis have used a different system of rewards to get the same results from Eddie
Munz?

Case 9 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?

Case 10. 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?

Case 11. 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?
Case 12. 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 focus 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?

Case 13. 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?
Chapter 15 Decision Making and Negotiation 

Case 14 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?

Case 15 Dimensions of Organization Structure 

15 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?

Case 16. A Structural Straitjacket 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
information 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?

Case 17. 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 could 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 seven-forty 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?

Case 18 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 part-time 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?

PART II. GROUP ASSIGNMENT

Practical Case: Identify an organization where one of the team members is working in.
Assume the organization is planning to undertake business process transformation
project where its current inefficient business processes will be changed so as to enable
the organization realize its vision and achieve its strategic goals. The business process
transformation project team collect information on process gaps from the following three
main stakeholders.

1. Internal exerts feedback on the process gaps

2. International best practices
3. External stakeholders’ feedback

Considering that the business process transformation will be followed by human capital
transformation, organization restructuring and information technology, develop change
management strategy for your organization.

Note:

1. The number of members in the grouped shouldn’t be more than 5 and if this
instruction is compromised, the work will be considered as null and void.
2. Apply assumptions wherever necessary.
3. You can use any of the available change management models.
4. Assignment submission date is 19-Jan-2020. This is not subject to compromise
and any delay will not be entertained.
5. Use this file naming convention when you send your assignment ‘Student Full
Name-Document Name-V1.0’
Example: Abebe Kebede-Individual Assignment-V1.0,

Same file naming pattern applies to final exam as:

‘Abebe Kebede-Final Exam-V1.0’

6. The assignment should be submitted in word formats.

7. Only one version is acceptable. You are not allowed to override whatever you
sent and you have to check before sending.
8. Use this Gmail account for assignment and final exam submission:
[email protected]. Please note, this is different from the one I
have been using before. This account is created to collect assignments
and exams only.
9. For further inquiry use my email ([email protected]) or telephone
number 0951-066969.