Management Skills Exercises
Learning activities in this section are aimed at helping you develop organizational change skills.
Cases
How Huntington Hospital Introduced Electronic Health Records
“How Huntington Hospital Introduced Electronic Health Records” (p. 241) and its related Challenge Case Summary were written to help you better understand the management concepts contained in this chapter. Answer the following discussion questions about the Challenge Case to better understand how concepts relating to organizational change and stress can be applied in a company such as Huntington.
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11-4. How difficult would it be for a lower-level administrator to spearhead an effort to find new electronic applications for record keeping throughout Huntington and actually implement the changes? Explain.
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11-5. Do you think that employees at Huntington would tend to resist the efforts of this lower-level administrator more than they would resist those of a higher-level administrator? Why or why not?
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11-6. What elements of the change process at Huntington described in the case might cause organization members to experience stress? What could a change agent do to help alleviate this stress? Be specific.
Business Management Resource Group’s Virtual Offices
Read the case and answer the questions that follow. Studying this case will help you better understand how concepts relating to organizational change and virtuality can be applied in a company such as Business Management Resource Group (BMRG).
Business Management Resource Group (BMRG) is not your ordinary accounting firm. Typically, this kind of business rents office space, which projects an image of stability and prosperity. There, accountants and support staff work together to meet with clients and prepare reports. BMRG, in contrast, does not operate out of a brick-and-mortar office. Instead, the Connecticut-based company’s two dozen employees operate in their own locations and keep in touch mainly online.
Although BMRG is prospering today, starting any business is full of challenges and stresses. The company’s founder, Jennifer Katrulya, initially worked out of her home and struggled to teach herself about computer hardware as technology advanced and her business grew. Despite having a background in accounting, not technology, she knew she needed a smoothly running computer system to meet her clients’ needs. Katrulya persevered, began hiring employees, and opened an office. She built BMRG into a successful firm that specializes in handling the controlling activities (overseeing all of a company’s accounting functions) at growing start-ups and midsized businesses across the United States and in several other countries. BMRG stores the data online so that clients can look up their financial data from wherever they are located.
Katrulya’s decision to go virtual followed developments in the firm’s growth. As investors referred businesses to BMRG, she needed employees in locations convenient to those clients. However, setting up an office for each new employee would have been expensive. Meanwhile, at the main office, some employees increasingly wanted to work from home. Katrulya also observed that more and more of the space she was renting was unoccupied. In addition, BMRG had been moving data and software online and eventually found the technology that made remote accounting painless. Virtual offices looked like a logical and practical next step.
Katrulya planned the transition to virtual offices to take place over a year. During that time, she shrank the company’s office space by half before eventually moving out. That way, until employees became comfortable with working from remote locations, they had the option to go into the offices occasionally. Even so, Katrulya encountered resistance and conflict. She admits that she did not fully anticipate the human relations challenges of implementing this organizational change. Instead, she presented employees with her entire vision and expected them to be on board. However, several employees left, and by the end of the change process, only two of the staff members remained. BMRG has since rebuilt with employees who appreciate the work arrangement.
Running virtual offices poses some management challenges. Building team spirit is harder from remote locations. Katrulya addresses the problem by holding staff meetings at least twice a year and sending employees to conferences, where they can get better acquainted. Another challenge is that some kinds of communication, such as performance feedback, are difficult to convey over a distance. Katrulya also must help her employees learn that it is acceptable—even beneficial—to switch off work-related devices and take a break.
According to Katrulya, the shift to working from virtual offices and sharing work online is saving BMRG more than $95,000 a year. Besides the savings, she says, the other major advantage of the arrangement is that BMRG can attract talented employees across the United States. In addition to the recruitment advantage, Katrulya views the financial savings as freeing up money to spend on employees’ compensation and development.55
Questions
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11-7. The chapter discusses three classes of factors (people, structure, and technology) to consider when determining what should be changed. How has BMRG’s growth brought changes affecting each of these factors?
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11-8. How can Jennifer Katrulya help her employees manage the stress of working in a growing organization with virtual offices?
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11-9. If you had been advising Katrulya about her plans to set up virtual offices, what advice would you have given her for overcoming resistance to change and for meeting the challenges of managing virtual offices?
Experiential Exercises
Managing Florida’s Quarterback56
Directions. Read the following scenario and then perform the listed activities. Your instructor may want you to perform the activities as an individual or within groups. Follow all of your instructor’s directions carefully.
When the University of Florida football team defended its national championship title, Urban Meyer, the head coach at Florida, along with every Gator football fan, fully expected sophomore quarterback Tim Tebow to have an important role in this title defense. Tebow had been a high school All American who proved that he could both throw and run the football.
Observing preseason workouts, Meyer started to worry about Tebow. Tebow’s arm was often sore, which prohibited him from throwing the football or forced him to sit out at practice. Meyer believed that Tebow’s baseball style of throwing the football was causing this soreness and decided that he wanted Tebow to change his passing style from his customary baseball passing style to the traditionally shorter, more compact football throwing style.
Questions
Your instructor will divide the class into small groups. Groups should answer the following questions.
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11-10. Should Meyer attempt to change Tebow’s throwing style? Why?
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11-11. List three reasons why Tebow might not want to change his style.
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11-12. List three reasons why Meyer might want to change Tebow’s style.
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11-13. Assuming that Meyer’s attempts to change Tebow’s style result in conflict between Meyer and Tebow, which conflict-handling technique(s) discussed in this chapter would you advise Meyer to adopt? Why?
Role Play
Think about your answers to the preceding questions and assume that Tebow is adamant about not changing his style. Half of the groups assigned by the instructor should be prepared to play the role of Tebow, and the other half should be prepared to play the role of Meyer. In this role-play situation, Meyer is having a meeting with Tebow to introduce the idea of Tebow changing his passing style. Meyer definitely wants Tebow to change; Tebow definitely does not want to change. Meyer has invited Tebow to his office and starts the conversation. The conversation might be recorded by the instructor for instructional replay.
You and Your Career
For the past 10 years, you have been working as a mid-level manager at Microsoft Corporation, which provides software products for various computing devices worldwide.57 Your career has been progressing nicely given the company’s traditional stance of developing new, revolutionary software products. However, Microsoft’s competition has now become much more formidable, and you just found out that to continue its success, the company must now focus on developing software product groups, products that interact and work well together, rather than simply developing independent software products. You have also heard that such a strategy will require the company to place higher value on managers who have internal collaboration and customer service skills. The company is planning to reorganize by establishing departments geared toward developing the new product groups. The new departments will be held accountable, via each department’s profit and loss statement, for both developing and selling the new product groups. The next upward move in your career would be managing one of the newly formed departments in about two years. Would you modify your personal career plan given the recent plans for change at Microsoft? If not, why? If so, how?
Building Your Management Skills Portfolio
Your Management Skills Portfolio is a collection of activities specially designed to demonstrate your management knowledge and skill. Be sure to save your work. Taking your printed portfolio to an employment interview could be helpful in obtaining a job.
The portfolio activity for this chapter is Managing Change-Related Stress. Read the following about the Ericson Manufacturing Company and answer the questions that follow.58
For more than 80 years, the Ericson Manufacturing Company has been an industry leader in manufacturing temporary electrical power products. The company has built a reputation of manufacturing safe, high-quality products. Products the company manufactures are varied and include electrical plugs, extension cords, and hand lamps.
For most of its nearly nine decades in business, management saw no need for extensive sales forecasting. Recently, however, Ericson’s business world began to change. Rising costs of the domestic materials used to make its products began to rise sharply. As a result of this price increase, the company began buying materials and parts from overseas vendors. Naturally, these parts and materials took longer to arrive than the same goods purchased from domestic vendors. This delay in the delivery of materials and parts significantly disrupted Ericson’s customary production process and related work scheduling of employees. Manufacturing began to be delayed and customer complaints began to increase significantly. Management soon found that as predicted delivery times from overseas vendors became more unreliable, warehouse managers began to order more parts than necessary to keep extra on hand, just in case. Therefore, too much money was tied up in inventory, and the company was becoming less profitable.
Assume that you are the president of Ericson Manufacturing Company. You know that you must make some changes within the company and that you’ll need a well-reasoned strategy to do so and also to minimize the negative effects of the employee stress related to the changes. Answering the following questions will help you develop this strategy.
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11-14. What are four organizational changes you would like to make at Ericson?
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11-15. Why would you like to make each change?
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11-16. What is a stressor inherent in each of your proposed changes that could affect worker productivity at Ericson?
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11-17. What will you do to try to eliminate the negative impact of each stressor?
MyManagementLab : Writing ExercisesIf your instructor has assigned this activity, go to mymanagementlab.com for the following assignments:
Assisted Grading Questions
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11-18. List and explain five reasons why organizations should undergo change.
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11-19. Why is handling conflict an important part of making an organizational change?
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