Conifer Corporation Case Study

Case Study – Conifer Corporation

Shanghui Sun

Westcliff University

BUS 540: Organizational Behavior

David Johnson, Ph.D.

August 12, 2018

 Case Study – Conifer Corporation.

Conifer corporation has been in operation for the last three decades. The company is operated by 16 support staff and supervisors, single general managers and 180 unionized members. The company has six departments and one of them, the packaging department, is experiencing significant challenges that are affecting the reputation and image of the business among its customers. For instance, the department does not have a supervisor resulting in employees leaving their work earlier and prolonging their breaks for five or ten minutes. As a result, the unit lags behind schedule resulting in piling up of products that are not adequately stored.  In addition to these challenges, the company depends on an external marketing agency to sell its products on international markets. For Conifer corporation products to enhance its competitiveness in the industry, it is important for the executive managers to introduce incentives to motivate employees in the packaging department, assign a supervisor in the unit to ensure that workers accomplish their activities as well as assess the needs of these employees to promote organization productivity.

Review/Analysis of the Case

        In this section, you will briefly describe what you will cover. It should only take a few sentences.

Symptoms Indicating That Something is Going Wrong

Conifer corporation is experiencing some symptoms within the packaging department. Packaging productivity has been declining over the past two years and affecting the rest of the departments negatively, resulting other departments barely to reach their goal due to backups and quality issues in packaging. The employees in packaging department are minimally supervised, and this is resulting in poor work performance. Inventory costs have been arising and the stocks are damaging. Lack of motivation in employees and even new workers here have adopt the unfitted norm at packaging department, such as lunch and shift abusing, resulting the unqualified appearance of the finished products and creating the business loss.

Causes of the Symptoms

According to the case study, all other departments have an independent supervisor except packaging department. Supervision that is in direct connect with their followers plays a critical role in motivating them on their work performance (Akinyele, 2009). For instance, they oversee their subordinates and guide them on what they should do as well as methods to adopt to enhance the company productivity. Besides, it is their responsibility to make sure that employees should deliver the instrument, material and other inputs needed to finish the assignments on time. Accoring to Akinyele (2009), supervision can greatly affect employees’ motivation and work performance. It is also their duty to keep rules and orders in the workplace and take measures against those who fail to adhere to the rules and orders. Therefore, failure to assign a supervisor for the packaging department resulted in detrimental outcomes for the company. Poor quality supervision or support, systems of work, policies or procedures, working relationship that do not encourage efficient or effective work will lead to poor work performance (Russell, 2011).

In this case, the lack of management attention misled employees that they were isolated and excluded from the rest of the company. Management can be conceived as impact on employees’ beliefs and values, resulting in performance improvement or deteriorate (Waldman, 1994). The packaging department poor performances has been showed everywhere. They packed the finished products with bad quality and they even failed to meet the schedule to deliver products. Despite the fact that the packaging department was always behind schedule; the sawmilling and planning departments increased their production worsening further the situation.

Another factor causing these symptoms are employee’s social loafing. “Social loafing has been defined as a phenomenon in which people exhibit a sizable decrease in individual effort when performing in groups as compared to when they perform alone and has been regarded as a state variable” (Ying et al, 2014, p465). According to Ying et al (2014), social loafing can lead to low productivity and poor group performance. As stated in the case study, the employees in the packaging department do not work hard on completing their assigned tasks resulting in increased inventory cost and damage to the company products. One reason is that employees in the packaging department are suffering from lack of leadership which affects their efficient completion of tasks. Another reason is that the employees in the packing department are paid on an hourly basis rather than having a monthly salary. For this reason, they prefer to postpone their work to over time to get extra pay rather that finish all tasks on time. According to Meydan et al (2014), the behaviors or attitudes that social loafers express have a negative influence among other group members. Even the new employees here will adapt this poor work ethics, they abused lunch time and shifts.

Executive Actions to Correct the Problem

According to the case study, the other departments within the company are adequately supervised resulting in improved efficiency and production of standard products except packaging department. Recording improved performance in the packaging department requires the company management to provide them with the same leadership and supervision enjoyed by other departments to enhance its productivity and efficiency. To resolve the lack of management in packing department, conifer corporation should hire and train a new manager, particularly for the packaging department. According to Maxwell (2008), appropriate surveillance, benefits with the purpose of keeping team’s endeavor, evaluation and training and development will make an effective team. Hiring a new manager may increase the company costs, however, it will decrease the overtime hours as well as the overtime cost from the employees at packaging department. New manager can set new rules to limit the overtime the employees want to use, and increase the productivity objective, making it finished before the deadline for specific products. Supervision will be added from the new manager, which will reduce the employee slacking and extent of the lunches and breaks. Although the cost of hiring and training a new manager for packaging department will be high, but the company will benefit from this in the long-term.