INSTRUCTIONS
You may also do additional research and use the results, as long as you cite your sources.
Try to limit your responses to about 800 to 1,000 words for each case. (Each case should be 3 pages.
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CASE STUDY 1
Times have been tough in the plastic knob business. Ask Ed Rogan, the owner of Rogan Corporation in Northbrook, Illinois, and he’ll tell you how the introduction of electronic controls on calibrating instruments has lost him many of his customers. A declining market made pay raises for his 107 employees out of the question, which in turn made it tough to keep them from bailing out—never mind motivating them. Rogan’s solution was to give his employees an incentive to find ways of cutting costs by giving them a share of the savings. The hundreds of ideas he received not only helped the company to stay afloat but earned the employees an extra 17 percent of their annual salaries in recent years.The key to the success of Rogan’s approach is that sharing improvements encourages employees to take responsibility for their own work.
A similar idea is used at Aspect Communications, a communications equipment manufacturer in San Jose, California, where instead of pegging bonuses to savings, pay is linked to two aspects of customer service: the amount of time the company’s product is operational, and measures of customer satisfaction. The basic idea, explains CEO Jim Carreker, is that for the company to be profitable, employees must demonstrate a long-term commitment to customer service. This approach has kept all of Aspect’s 400 employees carefully watching the measures on which their pay (and their customers’ satisfaction) is based. And it has kept them quite happy with their paychecks!
Paychecks also have been full of pleasant surprises for the 190 employees of the Calvert Group, a financial-management company based in Bethesda, Maryland. These checks include bonuses for outstanding performers and regular distributions of the company’s profits. The better the employees perform, the better the company does—and the more the employees make. Says Butler Perkins, a microcomputer-support analyst, “We all know the things we have to do to make more money.” And, it appears, Calvert employees are doing those things. This is only part of what the Calvert Group does to show appreciation for its employees, however. In a very unusual move, the company also reimburses its employees’ commuting expenses. If you walk to work, the company will even reimburse the cost of a pair of running shoes. To save on other expenses (e.g. dry cleaning) still further, Calvert has dropped its dress code, thus allowing employees to come to work in casual clothes—a feature they all like very much.
1. Explain how concepts of organizational justice may be used to explain the success of the incentive programs described here.
2. Effective incentives involve more than just money. Explain what these three firms are doing in recognition of this fact.
3. What basic tenets of expectancy theory are illustrated by the innovative incentive systems described here?
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CASE STUDY 2
Students please note: The first article linked below is made available to you through the University’s library databases. Therefore, you must be logged in as a student through the University portal for the link to work seamlessly. If you click the link and receive a request for a username and password, use the username and password that you use to log into your Thomas Edison State University courses. The link should then work.
Read the article “The Reincarnation of Mike Milken.” (Morris, K. (1999). The reincarnation of Mike Milken. Business Week, 3628, 92-104.) Then answer the following questions and justify all responses.
1. How would you rate Milken on self-monitoring? Explain your reasoning.
2. On scales of low = 1 to high = 10, how would you score Milken on each of the Big Five personality dimensions? How does the personality profile you have constructed for Milken explain his incredible comeback after prison and cancer?
3. Does Milken have an internal or external locus of control, and has this tendency helped or hindered him?
4. How would you rate Milken’s emotional intelligence? Explain.
Another, more recent article on Milken is the following:
Cohan, W.D. (2017, May 2). Michael Milken invented the modern junk bond, went to prison, and then became one of the most respected people on Wall Street. Business Insider.
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CASE STUDY 3
Core teams. Satellite teams. Empowerment. Self-managed teams. Much has been said and written about teams in the work environment. Advice such as keeping teams small (7 to 9 members) and developing specific goals and objectives are widely discussed in the literature. Leaders debate what the essential elements of effective teams are from their own experience.
At AOL, Ray Oglethorpe has provided specific guidelines that have made teams highly effective at his firm. In a team-based environment, people who report to you as a manager probably get much of their direction from other people (including their team leaders). People may be on more than one team. The challenge for the manager is to ensure that no individual is stretched too thin and that all workers have the appropriate training for the tasks that have been assigned. He also argues that size is critical to team effectiveness. His advice is to have the smallest number of people possible on each team with no delegates. In other words, the team must have the authority to make decisions.
John Katzenbach of Katzenbach Partners LCC has a different take on teams. He cites the Marine Corps as an excellent model of team deployment.He argues that teams are not always the best approach to problems.Teams should be assembled for appropriate problems and situations.He notes that in many organizations there are single-leader units that masquerade as teams. In these situations, group members work alone much of the time, yet there is pressure for the group to be viewed as a team. If a group tries to become a team when the performance challenge actually requires a single-leader approach, performance and morale suffer. The opposite is equally true. In fact, both miscues produce the dreaded “compromise-unit syndrome”: weak leadership, low levels of commitment, wasted time, and poor performance results.
Michael Leinbach is the Space Shuttle Launch Director at the Kennedy Space Center. His team deals with life and death decisions. For his team, communication that is clear and unfettered between team members and the team leader is essential for effective performance. He notes that it is a human characteristic to be sometimes intimidated by those in leadership positions. He stresses, however, the need for team members to be able to overcome this tendency. “I tell people that being on a team is like getting a huge family ready to go on a picnic. Say you have to get 50 or 60 people ready to go, and then one of the kids gets sick. Picnic scrubbed. You go when the kid is better. It’s as simple as that.” He emphasizes the importance of team members being at ease with team leaders.
Thomas C. Leppert, CEO of Turner Corporation, boils the essential elements of high-performing teams down to two elements: mutual respect among members and a common vision of where the team is going. At Turner they rely exclusively on high performing teams for all of their activity. Teams are not only internal to the organization. Team members consist of outside vendors and contractors as well.
“Innovative managers understand that they must do more than manage people. They need to manage the interactions between people. That’s not a subtle distinction. The best managers get their people to interact in creative ways.” This according to Michael Schrage at MIT Media Labs is the critical element in successful teams. He feels that many people are cynical regarding teams based on their previous experience in organizations that have paid lip service to the concept but have not committed the resources necessary to insure success.
Shared culture, leadership, and openness to new members are essential elements of effective teams for Tony DiCicco, former head coach of the U.S. Women’s World Cup Champion Soccer Team. He also notes that teams must learn from their successes as well as their failures.
Jeanie Duck at BCG argues that many teams do not spend nearly enough time in setting themselves up. She notes that teams are so intent on tackling the work projects that they do not invest adequately in the development of the team. She notes that rules must be established by the team to deal with a whole host of issues, including conflict. To attempt to deal with interpersonal conflict without a framework for doing so leads to serious dysfunction later on.
1. There are several different perspectives on team effectiveness subscribed to by the practitioners in this article. What are the similarities and differences of their approaches?
2. How do these actual experiences with teams compare to the academic literature on teams in organizations?
3. Do different organizations require differing approaches to team formation? Why or why not? Explain.
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CASE STUDY 4
Read the Wall Street Journal article: Petzinger, T., Jr. (1999, April 23). Lucent duo conquers distance and culture.
After reading the article, answer the following questions.
1. Could the 500 Lucent engineers who worked on the Bandwidth Manager project be called a team? Why or why not? Could Bill Klinger and Frank Polito be called a team? Explain.
2. What role, if any, did trust play in this case?
3. What lessons about managing virtual teams does this case teach us?
4. Which of the key attributes of high-performance teams are evident in this case? Which are not?
5. Based on what you have read, what was the overriding key to success in this case?
Case studies have been adapted from INC 5000 (“Best Compensation: Cashing In” and “The Productivity-Boosting Gain-Sharing Report” by Tom Ehrenfeld) and fastcompany.com (“What Makes Teams Work?” by Regina Fazio Maruca).