The Leadership Of The Engstrom Auto Mirror Plant

Although the managers at this company put forth a great deal of effort, there still lies many issues that have areas for improvement. For instance the managers lacked the opportunity to identify the organizational culture. There was an indefinite environment in which the employees were only represented with a vague framework of the culture. The importance of recognizing this is pertinent to both the employees and managers. Without establishing the organizational culture people cannot hold one another accountable, and performance begins to slip. In the same context, the quality of the product begins to slip as well. Engstrom could have attempted to distinguish this when the new plant manager, Ron Bent, came into his position. Although he strived to create a turnaround, he put too much emphasis on extrinsic rewards to validate employee appraisal verses instilling and identifying a culture that fosters it.

During May 2007, the Engstrom Auto Mirror Plant faces a low employee morale issue. The newly appointed manager, Ron Bent, sees a decline in work place productivity and culture throughout his recent years of working at the plant. When Bent joined the company, it was facing a similar issue of low morale. He then decided to introduce the Scalon Plan, an incentive program for the employees, to raise morale. The program was successful when it was first introduced but ran into problems time after. Bent was faced with many challenges with the Scalon Plan that caused him to ask many

The old crew began to hate the new supervisors. The supervisor’s attitude towards the employees were close monitoring, giving orders, and yelling. This caused stress and frustrations among employees, reducing their job performance. The supervisors made changes from the previous year that resulted in job satisfaction. The supervisors decided when to eat, how they wanted to do the job, and always drove the truck. They didn’t allow employees to talk to each other or to the customers on the job. This negatively affected customer service and customer relations.

1. There are a large number of problems at Engstrom. Worker morale is decreasing, and this is a combination of a few factors. The company instituted a Scanlon plan to drive productivity increases using cash bonuses. The employees have become accustomed to these bonuses, in part because the plan called for a reserve, which allowed Engstrom to pay out bonuses even when targets were not met. This created a disassociation between performance and reward. The employees now have a sense of entitlement. This manifests itself in reduced efforts to improve productivity, suspicion of management and in dissatisfaction when they do not receive their bonuses.

At the Engstrom Company there were many underlying issues that were truly affecting the company’s productivity and morale. When two of the most important factors in any organization are failing, it is nearly impossible for the company to stay afloat. Therefore,

The purpose of this assignment is the analysis of a case study for a manufacturing plant named Engstrom Auto Mirror located in Richmond IN. The company has been in business since 1948, during most of its existence the business ran well and they were successful but by the 1990’s they started a downward spiral toward being unprofitable. In the early 2000’s for a period of seven years their sales had quadrupled but in 2006 there was a downturn in the auto industry which led to cuts having to be made resulting in the unfortunate circumstance of layoffs. They currently have 209 employees which is down from 255, 46 people were layedoff in 2006. The catalyst for their prolonged period of propersity was the 1998 descison to implement an organization-wide incentive program called a Scanlon Plan. Prior to its implemation the company was marked by inefficiency, low productivity, low morale and quality issues, management measured productivity at 40% of expectectations. At the time of the case study the problems of the past were starting to surface again things like layoffs and no incentives for the employees were causing rumblings in the workforce. Another pressure point was the companies relationships with its customers that had been built in part through the gains made by implementing their Scanlon Plan and their customers put a lot of faith in the company to provide high quality products in a timely manner.

How does the crisis you selected in the module objective above portray and influence the organizational behavior and culture within the affected organization or institution?

Throughout the case of The Garden Depot the many problems that arises all have causes to why these problems even exist in the company. The many problems that exist can be seen from the relationships between the OEPT theory. One cause that creates a big problem in the company would be the lack of fit between the organization, process and individuals, this has caused many problems throughout the company because the company has no screening process for when hiring a new worker especially when it’s for filling a manager position. The company doesn’t have a good hiring and training process which resulted in hiring a manager who has no experience in the field, also doesn’t have the right skills to be a manager, the president hired his son in law

Confusion in the workplace often leads to employee ‘depression, poor interpersonal, team dynamics, dysfunction and lack of engagement’ (Moriarty, 2012), which ultimately affects the productivity of the business. The issue arises from poor planning and organisational processes, which can ultimately create a situation that leads to a company going bankrupt. (BBC Monitoring Middle East,

According to the information provided in the case, Joe Chaney is architectural specialist in the construction firm which experiencing elevated concentration of work due to the recent construction boom. However, due to the overwhelming workload and lack of motivation from the management, the efforts and positive attitude of the employees (In this case Joe Chaney) has been declining. Once confident, encouraging, efficient and exited about his work Joe became easily irritated, argumentative with his co-workers, and was also noted for “slacking off” multiple times at his work.

Whether good or bad, one thing is certain, change is inevitable. Organizations as well as people that do not acknowledge or embrace it are bound to fall behind or stagnate (Rooy, 2014). TransAct Insurance Corporation (TIC) was on the verge of needing change. A prominent auto insurer in Southeastern United States was attempting to revamp the way it conducted business. The goal was to improve customer service and strengthen its competitive position. The TIC Board of Directors had hired a new president and replaced three key vice presidents. One of the new VP’s being Jim Leon, would be tasked with leading the Claims division. This was no small task as Claims was the largest division with “1,500 employees, 50 claims center managers, and 5 regional directors” (McShane & Von Glinow, 2015, p. 449). Despite the size, Jim met with each manager and toured each of TIC’s 50 claims centers. As he spoke with employee at all levels he began to understand that moral was low and employee-management relations were tense. Georg C. Lichtenberg summed it nicely, “I cannot say whether things will get better if we change; what I can say is they must change if they are to get better” (Rooy, 2014). Change needed to take place to repair these working relationships, but where to start?

Brannigan Foods soup division general manager Bert Clark was in charge of bringing their company out their recent decline. The company had seen steady decline in division sales, market share, and profitability over the last three years. He was in charge of moving their division’s growth back up to 3-4% per year and his team had come up with four different plans for doing this. It was Bert’s responsibility to review the benefits and costs of each plan and choose the most effective way to grow the company.

Why or how did these issues arise? You are trying to determine cause and effect for the problems identified. It may be helpful to think of the organization in question as consisting of the following components:

To put it simply, our team aimed to start strong, investing in training and high benefits, with goals of continuing a strong initial quarter by reacting to each week as a new “start”. This turned out to be counterproductive, as our relatively massive spending in the first quarter of the first year had an adverse effect on our budget, effectively hamstringing us for the rest of the fiscal year. The business results were initially positive. Morale and productivity were high after the first quarter of year one, and we placed among the top three groups. This was the result of having put high focus and the majority of our funds towards benefits and training in the beginning. We were emboldened by these results and focused on mitigating future consequences of having to cut back on spending. As such, we decided to strategically under-hire, not realizing this would adversely affect absenteeism and product quality, as well as grievances. Since there were never enough workers to cover all the shifts workers became overworked which contributed to missing days of work, and also explains why they would be putting in less effort to ensure or double check the quality of all products (Steen, Noe, Hollenbeck, Gerhart, & Wright, 2016). We believed that our initial massive boost in benefits would compensate for not being able to afford a raise in wages. Our

When an organisation has a fault with something in the organisation, it is likely that