• QUESTION

   Case studies    

  Acme Manufacturing Company pp. 69-70

  Page 69

  Steve Arnold is a production manager at Acme Manufacturing Company in New Jersey. When he arrived at the plant on Tuesday morning at 8:45 a.m., he was already late for work. Arnold had overslept that morning because the night before he had stayed up late to finish the monthly production report for his department. Entering the office Arnold greeted his secretary, Ruth Sweeney, and asked whether anything urgent needed his immediate attention. Sweeney reminded him of the staff meeting at 9:30 a.m. with Arnold’s boss—Frank Jones, the Vice President for Production—and the other production managers. Arnold thanked Sweeney for reminding him (he had forgotten about the meeting) and continued on to his adjoining office to look for the email announcing the meeting. He vaguely remembered getting it a week earlier, but he did not read it carefully or look at the attached materials.

  His phone rang, and it was Sue Bradley, the Sales Vice President, who was inquiring about the status of a rush order for one of the company’s important clients. Arnold promised to look into the matter and get back to her later in the day with an answer. Arnold had delegated the rush order last week to Lucy Adams, one of his production supervisors, and he had not thought about it since then. Stepping back into the outer office, Arnold asked Sweeney if she had seen Adams today. Sweeney reminded him that Adams was at a training workshop in California and would be difficult to reach until the session ended late in the afternoon, because the workshop facilitators regard cell phone calls and text messages as an unnecessary distraction.

  Going back into his office, Arnold sent a text message to Adams asking her to call him as soon as possible. Then, he resumed his search for the email about the meeting with his boss and the other production managers. He found it in his large collection of unprocessed emails, and it said the purpose of the meeting was to discuss a proposal for changing the quality-control procedures. By now it was 9:25 a.m., and there was no time to read the proposal. He hurried out to get to the meeting on time. During the meeting, the other production managers participated in the discussion and made helpful comments or suggestions. Arnold was not prepared for the meeting and did not contribute much except to say that he did not anticipate any problems with the proposed changes.

  The meeting ended at 10:30 a.m., and Arnold returned to his office, where he found Paul Chen, one of his production supervisors, waiting for him. Chen wanted to discuss a problem caused in the production schedules by a major equipment breakdown. Arnold called Glenda Brown, his assistant manager, and asked her to join them to help rearrange the production schedules for the next few days. Glenda came in shortly and the three of them worked on the production schedules. They finished around noon and went out for lunch.

  Soon after returning from lunch, his boss (Frank Jones) stopped in to ask about the quality report for last week. Arnold explained that he had given top priority to finishing the monthly production report and would do the quality report next. Jones was irritated, because he needed the quality data to finalize his proposal for new procedures, and he thought Arnold understood this task was more urgent than the production report. He told Arnold to get the quality data to him as soon as possible and left. Arnold immediately called Glenda Brown and asked her to bring the quality data to his office. The task of reviewing the data and preparing a short summary was not difficult, but it took longer than he anticipated. It was 2:40 p.m. by the time Arnold completed the report and attached it to an email to his boss.

  Page 70

  Looking at his calendar, Arnold noticed that he was already late for a 2:30 meeting of the plant safety committee. The committee meets weekly to review safety problems, and each department sends a representative. Arnold rushed out to the meeting, which was held in another part of the plant. The meeting was dull this week, without any important issues or problems to discuss. The meeting ended at 3:30, and when Arnold unmuted his cell phone he discovered that Adams had tried to contact him before leaving to fly home from the conference. Arnold walked back through his section of the plant and stopped to talk to his assistant manager Glenda. She wanted some advice on how to resolve a problem in the production assignments for the next day, and they discussed the problem for about a half-hour. When Arnold returned to his office at 4:05, he was feeling tired and decided it was time to go home. As he drove out of the parking lot, Arnold reflected that he was getting further behind in his work and wondered what he could do to get better control over his job.

   

  Questions

  1. What specific things did Arnold do wrong, and what should have been done in each instance?
  2. What should Arnold do to become more effective as a manager?

   

   

  Alvis Corporation p. 104

   

  Kathy McCarthy was the manager of a production department in Alvis Corporation, a firm that manufactures office equipment. The workers are not unionized. After reading an article that stressed the benefits of participative management, McCarthy believed that these benefits could be realized in her department if the workers were allowed to participate in making some decisions that affect them. McCarthy selected two decisions for an experiment in participative management.

  The first decision involved vacation schedules. Each summer the workers are given two weeks of vacation, but no more than two workers can go on vacation at the same time. In prior years, McCarthy made this decision herself. She would first ask the workers to indicate their preferred dates, then she considered how the work would be affected if different people were out at the same time. It was important to plan a vacation schedule that would ensure adequate staffing for all of the essential operations performed by the department. When more than two workers wanted the same time period, and they had similar skills, she usually gave preference to the workers with the highest productivity.

  The second decision involved production standards. Sales had been increasing steadily over the past few years, and the company recently installed some new equipment to increase productivity. The new equipment would make it possible to produce more with the same number of workers. The company had a pay incentive system in which workers received a piece rate for each unit produced above a standard amount. Separate standards existed for each type of product, based on an industrial engineering study conducted a few years earlier. Top management wanted to readjust the production standards to reflect the fact that the new equipment made it possible for the workers to earn more without working any harder. The savings from higher productivity were needed to help pay for the new equipment.

  McCarthy called a meeting of her 15 workers an hour before the end of the workday and explained that she wanted them to discuss the two issues and make recommendations. McCarthy figured that the workers might be inhibited about participating in the discussion if she were present, so she left them alone to discuss the issues. Besides, McCarthy had an appointment to meet with the quality control manager. Quality problems had increased after the new equipment was installed, and the industrial engineers were studying the problem in an attempt to determine why quality had gotten worse rather than better.

  When McCarthy returned to her department just at quitting time, she was surprised to learn that the workers recommended keeping the standards the same. She had assumed they knew the pay incentives were no longer fair and would set a higher standard. The worker speaking for the group explained that their base pay had not kept up with inflation, and the higher incentive pay restored their real income to its prior level.

  On the vacation issue, the group was deadlocked. Several of the workers wanted to take their vacations during the same two-week period and could not agree on who should go. Some workers argued that they should have priority because they had more seniority, while others argued that priority should be based on productivity, as in the past. Because it was quitting time, the group concluded that McCarthy would have to resolve the dispute herself. After all, was not that what she was being paid for?

   

  Questions

  1. Were the two decisions appropriate for a group decision procedure according to the Vroom–Yetton model?
  2. What mistakes were made in using participation, and what could have been done to avoid the difficulties the manager encountered?
  3. Where these two decisions appropriate ones for introducing participation into the department?

Related Samples

• QUESTIONWeek 4 Discusssion 
  

  This is a discussion question that I need answered. I need the second portion of the questioned answered thoroughly, both bullet points. I have highlighted it in yellow to show that it is what I need answered. I need this r returned to me completed without any grammatical or punctual errors. The company that I want this question written about is Nissan Motor Corporation.

   

  Choose ONE of the following discussion question options to respond to:

  Using Adverse Conditions to a Company’s Advantage

  • Chakravorti (2010) discusses four methods that corporate innovators use to turn adverse conditions to their advantage. Examine an organization of your choice and briefly discuss how the organization might use one of these methods.

  -OR-

  Assessing Risk and Reward

  • Using the company of your choice, identify an important and difficult decision that they faced. What were the most important risks and the most important rewards of the decision?
  • What data, analysis or perspective would you have used to help Sr. Management decide if the rewards outweighed the risks?

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