Question

Business organizational behavior questions

Please read the article and answer 2 question below

Page 28 CASE STUDY: ANCOL CORP By Steven L. McShane, Curtin University (Australia) and University of Victoria (Canada Paul Sims was delighted when Ancol Corp, offered him the job of manager at its Lexington. Kentucky, plant. Sims was happy enough managing a small metal stamping plant with another company, but the invitation to apply for the plant manager job at one of the leading metal fabrication companies was irresistible. Although the Lexington plant was the smallest of Ancol's 15 operations, the plant manager position was a valuable first step in a promising career One of Sims's first observations at Ancol's Lexington plant was that relations between employees and management were strained. Taking a page from a recent executive seminar that he attended on building trust in the workplace, Sims ordered the removal of all time clocks from the plant. Instead. the plant would assume that employees had put in their full shift. This symbolic gesture, he believed, would establish a new level of credibility and strengthen relations between management and employees at the site. Initially, the 250 production employees at the Lexington plant appreciated their new freedom. They felt respected and saw this gesture as a sign of positive change from the new plant manager. Two months later, however, problems started to appear. A few people began showing up late, leaving early, or taking extended lunch breaks. Although this represented only about 5 percent of the employees, others found the situation unfair. The increased absenteeism levels were also beginning to have a noticeable effect on plant productivity. The problem had to be managed Sims asked supervisors to observe and record when the employees came or went and to discuss attendance problems with those ng their privileges. But the supervisors had no previous experience with keeping attendance and many lacked the necessary interpersonal skills to discuss the matter constructively with subordinates. Employees resented the reprimands, so relations with supervisors deteniorated. The additional responsibility of keeping track of attendance also made it difficult for supervisors to complete their other duties. After just a few months, Ancol found it necessary to add another supervisor position and number of employees assigned to each supervisor But the problems did not end there. Without time clocks, the employees were late. Instead, a letter of reprimand was placed in the employee's personnel file. However, this uedvt payroll department could not deduct pay for the amount of time

Answer 1

The removal of the time clock caused several impacts to the effectiveness of the organization. It caused an increase in morale as employees felt trusted. It did not take long however for some to start abusing the trust that had been given. People started leaving early and coming in late and this caused feelings of unfairness among the employees in general. Pay could not be docked as hours were not tracked. Reprimand letters were put in employee files causing grievances to be filed and many supervisory hours were taken up dealing with the increased paperwork.

In the Open Systems Perspective, the removal of the time clock, (an external environment factor) caused a decrease in the effectiveness of the internal subsystems (employees, payroll department and supervisors) which caused a direct decrease in outputs (stamped metal products) as less time was spent on production of the products and more time was spent on managing the absenteeism and resultant paperwork.