University murders are not isolated brutal events. Fears ignited on campus compromise student learning and personal growth. When violence disrupts a campus, the integrity of education is violated. Anxieties and uncertainties brought by harassments and threats impair the welfare of faculty, staff, students, and their surrounding communities. This case traces intricacies and impacts of a graduate student's harassment and violent threats to faculty and staff for nearly a year. There is no intention to summarize all aspects of the analysts' report on which this case is based, including descriptions of 955 distinct events related directly to this murder. Rather, the objective of this case is to capture the evolution of information, judgments, decisions, and actions during a crisis, as well as the contextual impact of organizational culture and norms, and to provoke readers' insights and judgment regarding crisis management successes and failures.
This case regards the perils of ineffective management and design that led to an organizational crisis. The setting is an amusement park where a water slide thrill ride was created in pursuit of a world record. Signals and warnings that should have been recognized, assessed and fixed to operate successfully and prevent a crisis were ignored. The park and stakeholders paid ultimate costs for their oversights.
This case provides an inside glimpse of an inter-organizational crisis as it unfolds. On January 25, 1990 at approximately 9:35 p.m. eastern standard time, Avianca flight 052 crashed into a hillside in a wooded residential area of Cove Neck, New York. Seventy-three of the 158 people on board died, including all of the flight crew, as well as five flight attendants. The National Transportation Safety Board concluded that the primary cause of the accident was fuel exhaustion. No one will ever understand the full range of causes that led to this accident. Like many crises, the fate of Avianca Airlines flight 052 was stirred by a deadly layering of intricate problems. Perhaps the most tragic among them relate directly to cross-cultural differences, as cues of the crisis were missed, mishandled and lost in translation. Urgencies that were slighted caused known and practiced signal detection and crisis responses to go awry. An exceptional feature of this case is that the evidence on which it rests puts the reader on the scene as the crisis unfolds.Verbatim cockpit dialogue, captured in black box recordings during the last hour before the accident, exposes the lethal impact of unreconciled diversities among languages, jargon, beliefs, values and habits. Relatively common flight problems flare to crisis proportion when individuals who could have averted or fixed them miss signals of impending doom. Accomplished leaders and operators are blindsided by their parochial interpretations of vocabulary and intent, which add fatal obstacles to crisis management efforts.
This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. It is impossible to block negative emotions from the workplace. Whether provoked by bad decisions, misfortune, or employees' personal problems, no organization is immune from trouble, and trouble agitates bad feelings. In many organizations, negative emotions are brushed aside or are altogether taboo. However, discounting or brushing aside negative emotions can be costly to organizations -leading to lost productivity and employee disengagement. For more than two decades, the author has studied workplace circumstances that evoke negative emotions, from exceptional organizational crises to everyday incivility. One fundamental finding is that few executives handle employees' negative feelings well. Many managers report that they do not know how to deal with negative emotions in the workplace. To address this condition, the author details how to improve competence and confidence in responding to negative emotions. She recommends specific actions to prepare for and step up to negative emotions at work -including anger, fear, and sadness, in particular. Promptly stepping up to negative emotions, the author points out, can stem interpersonal turbulence and keep satisfaction, engagement, and productivity intact. What's more, when negative emotions are acknowledged openly, the author argues, employees can learn to anticipate and interpret their colleagues' reactions to difficult circumstances more astutely. They grow to understand their own reactions better, too. With these improvements, appropriate responses to challenging situations can be made earlier, when adjustments are generally easier, more effective, and less expensive.
Micro-entrepreneurs in developing countries often lack basic business knowledge and personal confidence needed to make the leap that will take their businesses beyond subsistence. In many of these countries, little or no business training is available to women micro-entrepreneurs. In some developing countries, tradition and social convention about gender-determined roles and responsibilities lead women to stay in the home. Those who become micro-entrepreneurs are often driven to the choice by financial need and lack of job alternatives. This case describes the business challenges facing a female micro-entrepreneur who worked from home and who participated in a large-scale, collaborative business education program set in Peru called Proyecto Salta (or, Salta, which means leap in Spanish).
This case examines Project Salta (Salta) a multi-year collaborative experiment among financial institutions, a foreign government aid agency, and a global management school. Binding goals of Salta were to provide practical business information in sessions of short duration to micro-entrepreneurs operating at or near the bottom of the socio-economic pyramid, while keeping sponsors' costs exceptionally low. Salta serves as a test case and potential template for organizations investing in educating micro-entrepreneurs via lessons that are information, engaging, memorable and affordable. Details are provided regarding the origins and setting of the Salta program, its targeted participants, and parameters for the roll-out of the program. Students using the case are challenged to think creatively about how they would translate their understanding of basic business knowledge into the fundamentals needed to thrive as a micro-entrepreneur in a developing country. The case is especially relevant to individuals or organizations considering or engaging in corporate social responsibility opportunities. It is also highly relevant to empowerment of women at or near the base of the socio-economic pyramid, as well as micro-entrepreneurs in developing countries. Lessons center on challenges and advantages of educational philanthropy for these populations.
This case comprises four scenarios that exemplify some of the benefits of a very brief, very inexpensive educational program, El Gran Proyecto Salta (The Big Leap Project). Salta was designed to assist female micro-entrepreneurs in developing countries by teaching them basic business knowledge so that they might make the leap to the next level of success. Salta instruction was provided free of cost to more than 100,000 Peruvian women in very brief stand-alone sessions (three hours per session) at exceptionally low cost to sponsors ($38 per participant). Four women who participated in Salta are featured in this case. Each of these micro-entrepreneurs' stories includes their personal backgrounds, their adaptations of Salta lessons and experiences, and the benefits derived for their businesses, families, communities, and for themselves.
Tom Henderson, engineering manager and 10-year veteran of ABCO, leads the 25-member Omega product development team. While presenting his team's performance data at a monthly briefing meeting, Henderson is subjected to the verbal jabs of Bill Fenner, ABCO's VP of Distributed Services. As the meeting progresses, Fenner becomes increasingly aggressive, causing Henderson to falter in front of his colleagues and senior executives. After learning that their boss has been "shredded" by Fenner, the Omega team reduces its exceptional performance. Part B (in the Teaching Note) reveals Henderson's next actions. Part C (also in the Teaching Note) concludes with longer-term consequences for Henderson and ABCO.
We've all heard of (or experienced) the "boss from hell." But that's just one form that incivility in the workplace can take. Rudeness on the job is surprisingly common, and it's on the rise. Whether it involves overt bullying or subtle acts of thoughtlessness, incivility takes a toll. It erodes productivity, chips away at morale, leads employees to quit, and damages customer relationships. Dealing with its aftermath can soak up weeks of managerial attention and time. Over the past 14 years the authors have conducted interviews with and collected data from more than 14,000 people throughout the United States and Canada in order to track the prevalence, types, causes, costs, and cures of incivility at work. They suggest several steps leaders can take to counter rudeness. Managers should start with themselves--monitoring their own behavior, asking for feedback on it, and making sure that their actions are a model for others. When it comes to managing the organization, leaders should hire with civility in mind, teach it on the job, create group norms, reward good behavior, and penalize bad behavior. Lest consistent civility seem an extravagance, the authors caution that just one habitually offensive employee critically positioned in an organization can cost millions in lost employees, lost customers, and lost productivity.
Steve Jackson, a project professional at Western Construction (an international construction conglomerate), is attempting to introduce BSO, a new software package. Engineers at Western who would be using BSO seem to support the change, and BSO has already been adopted successfully by Western's competitor. However, Mike Barnett, a long-term Western employee of undisclosed hierarchical status and strong personal ties to the top, is leveraging every opportunity to kill the BSO project. Knowing that he must find a way to win Barnett over, Jackson attempts a variety of approaches to overcoming resistance to change, including turning to his own boss for assistance.
Lynne Tabor, an IT manager at manufacturing giant MMI, has a great team. Everyone works hard and gets along, except Max Dyer, a talented programmer who is terrible in the interpersonal skills department. Three years ago Tabor reworked his job after employees complained that he was unengaged and even belligerent. Since then, he's been a solid worker, putting in extra hours and meriting good performance evaluations. But recently, Dyer's coworkers have noticed a change for the worse in him. Everyone at MMI is on edge after a round of layoffs. Reports of a workplace shooting in Seattle are all over the news. One coworker finds Max pinning up a certificate from a shooting range in his cubicle, and another worries that they will all end up as statistics of office violence. They want to know how Tabor plans to ensure their safety. Dyer thinks his coworkers are out to get him. They believe he fits the profile of a man on the edge. But what can Tabor do about an employee who has never made so much as a veiled threat to anyone? In R0307A and R0307Z, commentators James Alan Fox, a professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University; Steve Kaufer, a cofounder of the Workplace Violence Research Institute; Christine Pearson, a management professor at Thunderbird; Christine Porath, a professor of management and organizational behavior at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business; and Ronald Schouten, the director of the Law and Psychiatry Service at Massachusetts General Hospital, offer advice on this fictional case study.
Lynne Tabor, an IT manager at manufacturing giant MMI, has a great team. Everyone works hard and gets along, except Max Dyer, a talented programmer who is terrible in the interpersonal skills department. Three years ago Tabor reworked his job after employees complained that he was unengaged and even belligerent. Since then, he's been a solid worker, putting in extra hours and meriting good performance evaluations. But recently, Dyer's coworkers have noticed a change for the worse in him. Everyone at MMI is on edge after a round of layoffs. Reports of a workplace shooting in Seattle are all over the news. One coworker finds Max pinning up a certificate from a shooting range in his cubicle, and another worries that they will all end up as statistics of office violence. They want to know how Tabor plans to ensure their safety. Dyer thinks his coworkers are out to get him. They believe he fits the profile of a man on the edge. But what can Tabor do about an employee who has never made so much as a veiled threat to anyone? In R0307A and R0307Z, commentators James Alan Fox, a professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University; Steve Kaufer, a cofounder of the Workplace Violence Research Institute; Christine Pearson, a management professor at Thunderbird; Christine Porath, a professor of management and organizational behavior at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business; and Ronald Schouten, the director of the Law and Psychiatry Service at Massachusetts General Hospital, offer advice on this fictional case study.
At WestJet, a regional airline service, the director of public relations and communications is wondering how best to manage journalist inquiries in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks. In the past, journalists were used to candid communication from WestJet and are expecting the same treatment this time around. Should the extraordinary circumstances presented necessitate a change in communications strategy?
This is a supplement to Julie Dempster (A), product 9B03C011. A newly hired vice-president of brand positioning must decide whether to renew her contract after experiencing cross-cultural and equality issues.
A black Canadian woman is hired as vice-president of marketing and brand positioning for an Amsterdam-based computer software company. Shortly after joining the firm she encounters a number of cross-cultural and equality issues. She must decide whether or not to renew her contract with the company. The supplement case, Julie Dempster (B), product 9B03C012 outlines her decision.
In the early 2000s, crisis management is a growth industry. Scarcely a month passes without news of organizational crises. Instantaneous media exposure worldwide raises the stakes for even modest size domestic businesses. Once-local ventures, when faced with crisis, may confront worldwide exposure. Whether challenged by hostile takeovers, plant explosions, equipment sabotage, product contamination, violence or some other threat to the viability of an organization, we work in a world where the need for crisis management skills and knowledge is on the rise. This note provides a basic background on organizational crisis management including how to determine what to prepare for and who can help.
In the early 2000s, crisis management is a growth industry. Scarcely a month passes without news of organizational crises. Instantaneous media exposure worldwide raises the stakes for even modest size domestic businesses. Once-local ventures, when faced with crisis, may confront worldwide exposure. Whether challenged by hostile takeovers, plant explosions, equipment sabotage, product contamination, violence or some other threat to the viability of an organization, we work in a world where the need for crisis management skills and knowledge is on the rise. This note provides a basic background on organizational crisis management including how to determine what to prepare for and who can help.