Problem
Humanized Robots?
Kathleen (Kathy) Brooks-Ramsay 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.
Kathy had inherited the business three years ago when her father, Keith Brooks, passed away unexpectedly. Brooks Machine Parts was founded four decades ago by Keith and had grown into a moderate-size business employing well over 50 employees on a full time basis and another 200 part time depending the project the business was working on. Brooks Machine Parts makes replacement parts for large-scale manufacturing machines such as lathes and mills. The firm is headquartered in Kingston Jamaica along Spanish Town Road between Three Miles and Six Miles. It had a branch in Montego Bay and did business throughout the English speaking Caribbean region.
Although Kathy grew up in the family business, she never understood her father's approach. Keith had treated his employees like part of his family. In Kathy'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 Kathy 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, Kathy had another goal for Brooks Machine Parts. 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, Brooks Machine Parts could grow rapidly. On the other, the lucrative parts market was also sure to attract more Japanese competitors. Kathy had to make sure that Brooks Machine Parts could compete effectively with highly productive and profitable Japanese firms.
From the day Kathy 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 football field her father had built to the side of the main building. She thought the employees really didn't use it much, and she wanted the space for future expansion.
Kathy 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, Kathy 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, Kathy 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 Kathy 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, Kathy finally had hired a Management Consultant. After carefully researching the history of the organization and Kathy's recent changes, the consultant made some remarkable suggestions. The bottom line, Kathy 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, Kathy 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.
Task
• List all of the Organizational Behaviour issues that you can identify in the case. List the issues in alphabetical order and bold and underline the three that you think are most important to the case.