A Structural Straitjacket at Wild Wear
Wild Wear makes clothing, rain gear, and sleeping bags for
hikers and other outdoor enthusiasts. The company began when Myrtle Kelly began
sewing pile jackets that her husband Ray sold on college campuses. It now
employs almost five hundred people organized into traditional divisions such as
marketing, manufacturing, and research and development.
Recently it became apparent that although Wild Wear’s
balance sheet appeared healthy, the company was stagnant. Everyone seemed to
work hard, and the company’s products seldom flopped. Yet Wild Wear seemed to
have developed a -me too- posture, bringing new products to market a season or
a full year after competitors.
The Kellys, who still run the company, pored over
performance appraisals looking for the weak points that might be holding the
company back. But it seemed that the human resources department had been doing
its work. R&D was coming up with a respectable number of new products, the
manufacturing facility was modern and efficient, and the marketing tactics
often won praise from customers.
Baffled, the Kellys called a meeting of middle-level
managers, hoping they could provide some answers they had missed. They were
shocked when they noticed that the managers were introducing themselves as they
came in and sat down. People who had been working in the same company for years
had never even met! The meeting began with this observation, and for ninety
minutes the Kellys sat back and listened to the problems their managers raised.
It became clear that in the attempt to grow from a family
operation into a larger company, the Kellys had assumed the two needed to be
very different. When they started out, the two of them handled all aspects of
the business. Ray would hear from a customer that backpackers really needed a
certain product. He would pass the idea on to Myrtle and order the materials
she needed, and within a few weeks he would offer the product to the delighted
customer. As the company grew, the Kellys began to worry about their lack of
formal business training and hired professionals to run each division and set
up appropriate rules and procedures.
What they had created, the middle managers informed them,
was a number of very efficient, productive divisions that might as well have
been separate companies. The R&D people might come up with a new breathable
fabric for rain gear, only to find that production had just begun making a new
rainwear line out of the old fabric and that marketing was turning all its
attention to selling the big inventory of sleeping bags. Each division did the
best it could with the information it had, but that information was very
incomplete. Products progressed linearly from one division to the next, but it
always seemed as though an idea that had been ahead of its time did not yield a
product until the time had passed.
To remedy the problem, the Kellys decided to call in a
management consultant to create more of a matrix structure for Wild Wear. While
they were waiting for the consultant’s solutions, they began holding weekly
-horizon- meetings. The group of middle managers would get together every
Monday and discuss what they saw on their horizon. After less than a month of
such meetings, the excitement gene
Assignment requirements
This case study analysis report requires the identification,
analysis, and evaluation of the behaviour in a workplace featured in the given
case study, linking to the relevant organisational behaviour concepts and their
applications.
1) Criteria used to grade this task
The following marking criteria is used:
i) Application of relevant concepts (25% weight)
ii) Elucidation (50% weight)
iii) Research and accurate referencing (25% weight)
Expected word length is 2000 words excluding the reference
list. Prepare the report in the question and answer style, answering all the
questions in the case study equally.
0 comments:
Post a Comment