Leadership Change

Good Sport is a fitness equipment manufacturing company that has been in business for the past fifteen years. Good Sport was founded by ex-basketball star athlete Jason Poole who is presently Good Sport's Chairman of the Board. Over the past four years, Marvin Wallace, Good Sport's Chief Executive Officer has propelled the organization to expand business to the hospital industry as well as used innovations in all areas such as sales, production and research and development teams. Good Sport is expanding business in neighboring states Georgia, North and South Carolinas. They have not only extended business territorial yet expanding in the market. Good Sport sells products to hotels, clubs, and residential houses.

Good Sport as a fitness manufacture is considering the latest trends and designs in equipment while being cost effective and initiating new ideas. Good Sport needs to discuss within the organizational structure the necessary political strategies and consider the culture of each department. The Good sport manager will attend to possible problems and symptoms concerns addressed by departments. As a manager at Good Sport one has to use various political tactics to increase power within the organization. Good Sport needs to achieve their common goal to reach their fullest potential in creating fitness innovations and style.

Good Sport's organizational structure appears to be an organic, flat structure with a divisional with some functional organizational design type. Organizational structure is a method of representing relationships within an organization, a structure of the interrelated groups of an organization. "An organic structure is low complexity and formation that decentralized decision-making." (Goltz, 2007) This structure also relates to organizational culture by adaptable duties, flexible relationships, horizontal and upward communication. A Divisional Structure has grouping by production, marketing, R & D. Each group the same tasks but for a different topic, customer, product, location, etc. The advantages to a Divisional structure are having coordination within product lines made easier. The departments are more adaptable to change in environment to promote growth personally and professionally. Competition across divisions can serve as a motivator. The responsibility for failures and successes can be identified.

Basically, organizational culture is the personality of the organization. Culture is comprised of the assumptions, values, norms and tangible signs (artifacts) of organization members and their behaviors. Most of the employees of the "Academy type" of culture, for the reason that they have had a great deal of years invested in the organization. Employees are highly skilled and tend to stay in the organization, while working their way up the ranks. The organizations provide a stable environment in which employees can development and exercise their skills.(McNarmara, 1997) In order to have an effective team and organization culture must exist. Culture is critical to learning and growing together to effectively reach a common goal.

The concept of culture is particularly important when attempting to manage organization-wide change. Good Sport's organizational change must include not only changing structures and processes, but also changing the organizational culture as well. Each department has each of their own topics to consider when reaching the common goal. Therefore their personalities and values which defined the culture of the organization must be taking fully into consideration. The functions of organizational culture are to give members an organizational identity, facilitate collective commitment, and promote social-system stability and to shape behaviors by helping employees make sense of their surroundings. (Williams, 2003) Organizational structure and culture relate because Good Sport desires to reach a common goal. Tactics are applied to persuade groups to buy into new projects. Organizational political strategies are designed to overcome obstacles and opposition. When engaged the managers can increase their power to effectively reach the common goal. The two are compatible because culture involved tactics to get others to support the effort and to persuade someone to relate to others. Culture is made up of the values, beliefs, underlying assumptions, attitudes, and behaviors shared by a group of people. Culture is the behavior that results when a group arrives at a set of - generally unspoken and unwritten - rules for working together. (Heathfield, 2007) An organization's culture is made up of all of the life experiences each employee brings to the organization.

Good Sport applies culture that builds enthusiasm by appealing to others emotional needs and values. The author believes that why the strategies of informal dinner meetings were take into contemplation to relate better to employees and find a common ground of quality of work and personable skills. These tactics are determined by the interdependency of various department hierarchies within the organization and the person equations between employees.

Good Sport's power struggles included difficulty with maintaining positive impact with resolving symptoms to each department's issues with peers, employee morale, subordinates and the CEO. In the decision making process the author believes that it is best to outline their plans for each department and upper management prior to final decision making. The department you have some time to share and deliberate on their issues and offer any suggestions to make the plan work. By considering the other departments and value their suggestions will motivate the employees to feel included and acknowledged by their superiors. By Good Sport having an organic structure incorporates well defined problems prior to culture barriers. Good Sport could have possibly discussed more about promotions and incentives to promote change while dealing with transitional issues to alleviate low-employee morale by acknowledging everyone's part in reaching the common goal.

The powe structure and policies include issues with cost increases and posed questions of difficulty to sale the new product. Upper management's history and expectations have definitely conveyed some issues with politics was convincing the leaders (mangers) that this is something they wanted to push and promote growth in business. Using the customer survey to express the client's needs and helps develop and serve the client's needs and the customer has a voice within the organization to support and implement their suggestions and present culture and style. The sales department has destined work culture. Their persuading comes from the influence of soft tactics.