Steel City Inc. is a company located in Dallas in the UnitedStates of America. It deals in import export of furniture. Theworkforce is composed of almost 200 employees, from differentlevels. In Steel City, Inc., the president Anna, 33 years old,realizes that this firm requires some reorganization.
The organization is using the top down management approach, ithas many levels of management and it uses narrowly specialized jobdescriptions.
Anna wants to move into new international markets but shenoticed that employees are demotivated and they are not happy intheir positions knowing that Steel City, Inc is applying highlyspecialized jobs and employees already work independently and incomplete autonomy.
Knowing that motivation is very crucial to the productivity ofher employees, Anna wanted to work on this issue by increasingemployees’ motivation. To do so, she decided to review and changesome core characteristics of what they are doing and she was surethat this will certainly end up with beneficial workoutcomes.
Anna also used the work flow analysis of Steel City, Inc todefine how work in this organization creates value to the ongoingprocess of employees’ works. She thought that applying the BusinessProcess Reengineering (BPR) might be very efficient to solve theproblem of employees’ demotivation since employees have beencomplaining about their work. Jobs are repetitive and employeesdon't know how their work fits into the big organizational picture.The president wants to reduce operating costs, reorganize jobs byproviding employees with satisfying work, independency and wantedthem to be cross trained on different task assigned to thegroup.
Anna also thought about using a problem solving team to beable to generate solutions about how to decrease employees’demotivation and increase their work involvement, devotion andcommitment.
As she wants jobs to become more interesting and precisely toimprove motivation, Anna included specialized task together soemployees can expand their work horizontally and vertically. All ofthis should give employees more autonomy and the opportunity forfeedback. Anna decided to compare the productivity of her employeessix months after she made the needed adjustments in thecompany.
1. ​Based on the above case study, what is the usedorganizational structure by Steel City, Inc? Explain.
2. ​Which motivation theory the president's is using tominimize employees’ dissatisfaction?
3. ​When the job needs to be reorganized some job designmodifications should also be implemented. What job design do youpropose taking into consideration employees’ complains?
4. ​What type of team the president can use in order to reduceoperating costs giving employees some autonomy in Steel City,Inc.?
