Case Scenario:
You are the newly promoted Manufacturing Coordinator, reporting directly to the Director of Operations at Universal Products, International (UPI) a medium sized manufacturer of high-end consumer electronics components. You have several years of increasing responsibility in UPI, working your way up from a production team member to this new position with supervisory responsibilities. You have spent several years as a member of an Organizational Culture (OC) team that has reviewed organizational issues. This is a team composed of volunteers from across the company. This group makes recommendations for improvements that address employee morale and safety. Membership on the OC is for two years. Your term expired last year and you have been looking for ways to continue to contribute to improving the organizational culture.
You have been taking courses at CTU for the past few years and are nearing your degree completion. You have studied leadership, finance, accounting and other business administration courses that provide you with a working understanding of UPI structure and the core business competencies of the company. You applied for your new position and were promoted to help move the organization toward a more collaborative and participative culture. Your new supervisor is responsible for all manufacturing related departments. He reports to the VP of Operations and her area of responsibility is all company operations. Her peers are the Vice Presidents of Finance, IT, HR, Marketing, and Supply Chain Management. They all report to the company President.
The company has grown from 50 employees to over 300 hundred in the past four years. You have been part of this dramatic growth and have watched the company struggle with changes in reporting relationships, additions of new layers of management and adding several new product lines. UPI is poised for another large growth with the development of a new electronic component that will make portable video players more efficient.
The company is anticipating adding another 150 employees and opening a new production facility across town on a parcel of land that UPI recently purchased. This will mean that your department will have employees in two locations for the first time.
In addition to your regular tasks, your supervisor has asked you to serve on a project staff team that was formed to work out the changes that will be necessary as the new plant comes online. Other project staff will include your peers in other departments. This project team must be up and ready to make recommendations on changes within the next 90 days in preparation for how the two plant facilities will interact. In addition, this team can expect that the directors will routinely delegate other new projects and initiatives to discuss and submit recommendations.
You also will maintain your new responsibilities for a staff of 8 employees who coordinate production scheduling and coordinate with the two HR generalists that are physically located in the operations department but report to the HR department.
To be successful in this new assignment, you will need to apply what you know about organizations, their structures, change management, and how individuals work within organizations.
Below is the assignment detail:
Your supervisor has asked you to lead the project for adding employees for the new plant. It is a new production facility, with a new product line and manufacturing process, UPI has designed. You anticipate that some existing employees will be interested in transferring to the new plant and you will be hiring over 50 new employees, some to backfill the transfers and others to staff the new facility. You are not responsible for the hiring process, HR will manage that, but your Director wants your team to be sure that new hires fit into the culture. You have discussed with him and you both agree it is a great time to start making some cultural changes to make the work environment more challenging and interesting to address the issues of performance and morale for a long-term solution.
To address this need you research and prepare a report to share with your Director, including the following elements:
Q1. What is the impact on of individual employee's personalities on their attitudes towards work?
Q2. How can individual values influence workforce performance, both positively and negatively?
Q3. Discuss how to use job design to create the high performance work climate that UPI wants to create in both the existing and new production facilities.
Q4. What types of goals do you suggest UPI use to foster a collaborative work environment?