Eric and Kipsy

Background Information

Eric and Kipsy are employees in a company that wholesales electrical equipment. Eric is the new manager of product information for the company who was hired right out of management training; Kipsy is one of the 35 ladies employed by the company in this department. These ladies were supposed to provide salesmen with current information about pricing, availability and delivery time of electrical supplies and range from high school graduates and older housewives. Eric spent his first day on the job just listening and watching, trying to understand how things worked and show his new staff that he was genuinely interested in what was going on. The effectiveness of the operation and the pleasantness of the office space fascinated Eric and he was under the impression that everything was under control.

However, Eric was severely mistaken about how smoothly the company’s operations ran. On his second day alone, he was met with numerous complaints from field salesmen about the product information service. The salesmen were often unable to get through to the clerks, too many errors were being made, and the clerks were unfriendly and abrupt. As he looked into this problem, he discovered that absenteeism, as well as turnover, was extremely high. On days when absenteeism was especially high, temporary workers were brought in. However, these part-time employees were unfamiliar with the job which caused incorrect information to be relayed to the salesmen. Furthermore, Eric learned that loafing on the job was a common occurrence, and the women had created a system which alerted everyone when a supervisor was near or listening in to the conversations between the clerks and the salesmen.

Eric devised a crash program increase efficiency, reduce call-in delays and slash the error rate. Following the failure of this programme, Eric realized that he probably only attacked the “symptoms” and not the “disease” with his crash program, so he thought carefully and thoroughly about the possible problems in the institution. Each potential problem he came up with, was quickly cancelled out after further reasoning, and he finally concluded that the problem here was an employee named Kipsy.

Kipsy had become very dissatisfied, unhappy and frustrated with her job because her hopes and dreams for the position did not come true. When she first applied for the job, everything from her friend’s good words to the training she went through prepared her for an exciting role in a fast growing organization that would also provide her with opportunities for advancement. However, after the first few weeks of the job, the excitement wore off when she realized the difficult tasks she’d been taught to solve weren’t occurring. The job became monotonous and routine, with seemingly no room for advancement and personal initiative. After working there for nearly a year, the concluded that the only good thing about the job was that she had become the informal leader of the group.

When she heard they were getting a new manager, she thought that finally there would be a change for the better. She was certain that the new manager would shake things up once he heard how miserable the clerks felt. Her high hopes for him were confirmed by his first few days on the job. He seemed genuinely interested in learning about the job and gave a listening ear to employee suggestions. However, much to her dismay, when she and two other employees proposed their well thought out plan to make hours more flexible, Eric was unable to make that happen, and blamed it on his superiors. Furthermore, when she came to him with her grievances, he appeared condescending and treated her like a child. Frustrated and at the end of her rope, she told him off angrily. She knew, afterwards, that this wasn’t the right thing to do but she was too ashamed to apologize.

Kipsy was left feeling as if all hope was lost, her attempts at finding a new job were proving unsuccessful and there seemed to be no chance for change at her current workplace. She was therefore stuck, not knowing what to do and growing more and more frustrated and unhappy.

Analysis

After thorough analysis of the case, it has been discovered that the core problem here is leadership. Leadership is the ability to influence a group toward the achievement of a vision or set of goals. (Robbins & Judge 2012, p. 328) Leadership is at its best when the vision is strategic, the voice persuasive and the results tangible. (Useem 2001, p. 297)

This core problem of leadership, or lack thereof, results in multiple satellite problems. This problem needs to be addressed before the satellite problems can be solved. This is the “disease” of the company that was referred to earlier. When we look at this issue, we need to pay attention not only to Eric but to Kipsy, who has become the informal leader of the workgroup.

From this core problem, many satellite problems arise. Satellite problems are problems that are caused by the core problem. While reading this case, the following satellite problems were discovered.

Perception. It is suggested that employees are less engaged when they believed a company’s HR practices were motivated by a desire to reduce costs and exploit employees. (Nishii, Lepak & Schneider 2011) In this case, due to poor leadership on Eric’s part, the employees had a poor perception of him; they did not believe that he truly cared about how miserable they were, he, in their mind, showed to only care about the bottom-line.

Job dissatisfaction. The clerks felt that the job was boring and monotonous and were not motivated to do it well. They had entered the job believing that there would be opportunities for advancement, and this was not the case. They were frustrated and unhappy which resulted in the high absenteeism and turnover, and also in their poor interaction with the salesmen.

Communication. The company is using a rigid downward communication flow. Downward communication flow implies that communication flows from the managers to the employees. It’s used to inform, direct, coordinate, and evaluate employees. (Robbins & Coulter 2012, p. 412) However, this type of communication is proving detrimental to this company.