In January 2020, Philippe Isler, director of the Global Alliance for Trade Facilitation (Alliance), was preparing for the Alliance’s steering group meeting that spring. He needed to set forth a plan on how to scale Alliance operations to deliver on current and proposed projects. The Alliance had only three years left in its current funding cycle, and a long list of projects to complete. Isler knew that meeting the funding governments’ expectations with the current structure would be a challenge for the Alliance. He thus faced a complex organizational design challenge and had to reflect how to develop the efficiency of the Alliance. Isler considered three options to scale Alliance operations: growing organically, adding several arms-length implementing partners, and adding a new implementing partner into the Alliance secretariat. Alternatively, he could dial back the Alliance’s current growth plans.
A 24-year-old female employee landed her first career job at Exeter Group only a few months after graduating from university. The employee worked as an assistant to the company’s co-founder and chief executive officer. A few months after the employee began her new job, her boss began making work requests that seemed personal and then began making repeated sexual advances, which made the employee feel increasingly uncomfortable. The employee tried to curb the boss’s behaviour on several occasions, but she felt caught between dealing with harassment from her boss and trying to develop her career.<br><br>One late evening during a business trip, the boss drunkenly and forcibly disrupted the employee in her hotel room and attempted to coerce her into having sex with him. The employee evaded the advance by locking herself in the bathroom of her hotel room. As she sat on the floor of the bathroom, she wondered how she had found herself in this extremely difficult situation and how she would get out of it.
On April 5, 2017, the lead link at Liip AG, in Lausanne, Switzerland, was reflecting on the past seven years. The digital services organization had gone through a rapid development, from a company with a team-based structure led by a top management team to a holacratic organization. A holacratic structure was based on a skeleton of roles and processes, with individual employees self-defining their work with the intent to help the company fulfill its purpose. However, was a holacratic structure sustainable over the long term for a growing company? What potential inefficiencies might Liip AG face under a holacratic structure and how could the organization overcome them?
At the end of March 2018, the director of the Barcelona office of Street Child, a charity organization with headquarters in the United Kingdom, was looking back at the changes he had introduced in 2017. The Barcelona office was responsible for growing Street Child in continental Europe, so it was internally known as Street Child Europe. Since January 2018, the office had added a paid employee. This employee was also the director of Street Child Netherlands and a former program support officer in Sierra Leone. The office could now employ up to eight interns, twice as many as before. However, Street Child Europe still needed to accomplish five key tasks: address its governance structure, clarify its brand positioning, consolidate its fundraising strategy, increase the appeal of its international volunteer program, and sett up an internal system to use its network effectively. The director needed concrete and executable strategies to ensure stable and sustainable growth of the charity across Europe.
A recently hired U.S.-trained sales account manager at Medical Equipment Inc. (Medical Equipment) returned to his office after meeting with the head of the cardiology department at a specialist hospital and research center in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He had worked very hard to secure his first sale of US$725,000 for healthcare equipment, but was disheartened when the head of cardiology told him that the hospital's purchasing director intended to give the order to Medical Equipment's main competitor. The competition's sales representative and the purchasing director had known each other for 10 years and the head cardiologist implied that there might be side payments involved. The sales account manager knew Medical Equipment's product was superior and wondered how he could secure the order without having a history with the purchasing director or without engaging in practices he found ethically questionable.
Subtle biases and covert prejudice affect interactions in the workplace. Subtle biases are automatically activated associations or stereotypes that relate groups (e.g. men and women) with attributes or characteristics (e.g. career or household), often outside of our awareness. Covert prejudice refers to concealed negative opinions about members of other groups. Managers and business leaders can benefit both from understanding how subtle biases and covert prejudices can translate into discriminatory behaviors and from learning to manage in a way that avoids such biases and prejudices. The note has four sections, each of which can be read individually: Managerial Relevance, Subtle Biases, Covert Prejudice, and Managing to Avoid Subtle Biases and Covert Prejudice.
This case describes the measurement and evaluation of high performance principles of people management in a retail bank by a consulting company. This case serves as a platform for students to deliberate on what is involved in an organization's quest to achieve competitive success through its workforce. A unique strength of the case is that students are asked to quantitatively test their arguments with data provided in an Excel spreadsheet that accompanies the case (Ivey product #7B07C004). The case is intended as an integrated case across organizational behavior, management science and communication. The organizational behavior teaching approach is included to demonstrate that effective people management is associated with competitive advantages. For management science, the case serves to practice correlation and regression analyses. For communication, the case allows students to prepare a presentation that effectively communicates the complex and comprehensive results of their analyses.
Leo Burnett Company Ltd. is a global advertising agency. The company is working with one of its largest clients to launch a new line of hair care products into the Canadian and Taiwanese test markets in preparation for a global rollout. Normally, once a brand has been launched, it is customary for the global brand centre to turn over the responsibility for the brand and future campaigns to the local market offices. In this case, however, the brand launch was not successful. Team communications and the team dynamics have broken down in recent months and the relationships are strained. Further complicating matters are a number of client and agency staffing changes that could jeopardize the stability of the team and the agency/client relationship. The global account director must decide whether she should proceed with the expected decision to modify the global team structure to give one of the teams more autonomy, or whether she should maintain greater centralized control over the team. She must recommend how to move forward with the brand and determine what changes in team structure or management are necessary.
Salco (China) is a global manufacturer of burners for hot-water boilers and industrial furnaces and ovens. The company has recently hired a new operations manager for their plant in China whose mandate is to improve the efficiency of the Beijing office, to eliminate Salco's Chinese distributors' poaching behavior and to elevate Salco's brand equity in the Chinese market. After implementation, the initiative to eliminate distributors' poaching had failed and the company's operations manager must determine why this initiative failed and prepare a report for senior management.
An orphanage and foster care home for young children in Guyana was staffed by women who were paid a small monthly stipend. The facility was in poor physical state, the 54-hour workweek was exhausting and absenteeism was rampant. The new director tried to turn the facility around by repairing the building, improving the working conditions and seeking staff input. On the country's notational holiday, however, none of the staff reported for work. The director decided to implement new rules and a system of accountability. When the local public hospital staff went on strike, the director of the children's home was asked to run the hospital with its volunteers. After eight weeks, she returned to the children's home to discover that it was thriving, despite her absence. She decided that her work was completed and she returned to Canada. Nearly two years later, the former director visited the children's home and reflected on her management efforts. This is a supplement to Red Cross Children's Home: Building Capabilities in Guyana (A), product 9B02C042 and Red Cross Children's Home: Building Capabilities in Guyana (B), product 9B02C047.
This is a supplement to Red Cross Children's Home: Building Capabilities in Guyana (A), product 9B02C042. An orphanage and foster care home for young children in Guyana was staffed by women who were paid a small monthly stipend. The facility was in poor physical state, the 54-hour workweek was exhausting and absenteeism was rampant. The new director tried to turn the facility around by repairing the building, improving the working conditions and seeking staff input. On the country's national holiday, however, none of the staff reported for work. The director decided to implement new rules and a system of accountability. When the local public hospital staff went on strike, the director of the children's home was asked to run the hospital with its volunteers. After eight weeks, she returned to the children's home to discover that it was thriving, despite her absence. She decided that her work was completed and she returned to Canada. In supplemental case Red Cross Children's Home: Building Capabilities in Guyana (C), product 9B02C048, the former director visits the children's home after an absence of nearly two years and reflects on her management efforts.
An orphanage and foster care home for young children in Guyana was staffed by women who were paid a small monthly stipend. The facility was in poor physical state, the 54-hour workweek was exhausting and absenteeism was rampant. The new director tried to turn the facility around by repairing the building, improving the working conditions and seeking staff input. On the country's national holiday, however, none of the staff reported for work. The director considered her options: resignation, asking for additional resources, giving the staff more responsibility or disciplining the staff. Supplement case Red Cross Children's Home: Building Capabilities in Guyana (B), product 9B02C047 describes the actions taken by the director and their outcome. In supplemental case Red Cross Children's Home: Building Capabilities in Guyana (C), product 9B02C048, the former director visits the children's home after an absence of nearly two years and reflects on her management efforts. A 22 minute video is available, product 7B02C042 and a PowerPoint slide presentation, product 5B02C42.
As a startup in the online sales incentives industry, SalesDriver had a unique product to offer: online sales contests. From its early stages, SalesDriver had a great product, e-tailer relationships and initial customers who were pleased with the service. What SalesDriver needed was personnel. SalesDriver's two co-founders were facing several challenges. They were both young and making their first independent leap into the dot-com industry. With limited funding and no hiring experience, they needed to put together a staff for their company and wanted to do so within a two-week time frame. Their first need was to hire a vice-president of sales, but their candidate of preference had 15 other job offers on his plate, so time was of the essence. How much should they offer? What incentives should they include? What kind of fit would they have as a working team and would they even have enough time to assess that fit? The two friends and business partners were faced with the difficult challenge of working out a winning offer that would persuade the right person to accept a position in their very young company.
Helped the Aged Canada, a non-profit organization, has hired Kate Archer to manage their prosthetic clinic in Haiti. After her arrival in Haiti she learns that its key employee does not meet her performance expectations. Communicating with the employee, a deaf-mute, however, was very difficult and required the use of another employee as translator. She must communicate her performance expectations to the employee. The supplement to this case, Kate Archer In Haiti (B), product number 9B01C036 describes how Kate develops a contract and finalizes the agreement with the employee.
NES is one of Germany's largest industrial manufacturing groups. The company wants to set up a holding company to facilitate its manufacturing activities in China. They have authorized representatives in their Beijing office to draw up the holding company application and to negotiate with the Chinese government for terms of this agreement. In order to maximize their chances of having their application accepted, the NES team in Beijing hires a government affairs coordinator who is a native Chinese and whose professional background has familiarized her with Chinese ways of doing business. NES's government affairs coordinator finds herself in a difficult position when she proposes that gifts should be given to government officials in order to establish a working relationship that will better NES's chance of having its application approved. This method of doing business is quite common in China. The other members of the NES team are shocked at what would be considered bribery and a criminal offence in their country. The coordinator must find a practical way to bridge the gap between working within accepted business practices in China and respecting her employers' code of business ethics. The complementary (B) case (9B01C030) gives a brief summary of the eventual solution to this problem.
As a family man and the president of a small consulting company, Bruce Cruickshank has a lot of hats to wear. Bruce is passionate about his business and enjoys his work, but the pressures of balancing professional life and family life are beginning to take a physical and mental toll. Bruce has a plan in mind for streamlining and expanding his business, but, as it is, he already feels pressed for time to get things accomplished at the office. His assistant is just as busy with her own duties, and it's difficult to make the time to find, hire and train a new employee. At home, Bruce's wife wishes they could spend more time together. As well, Bruce is a devoted father, and being with his children is important to him. The challenges involved in successfully combining his professional life with his family life and leisure time are uppermost in Bruce's thoughts, and he wants to find a healthier balance for the future.
SalesDriver is a start-up company that develops online software packages for sales incentive contests. The vice president of marketing and distribution, who was also a company founder, considers how to address the challenge of retaining key employees in the growing high-technology industry, where employee turnover is very high.
Budget pressures were forcing Talbot University's supply department to reduce its costs. While the workload remained high, the department head wondered how to reorganize the department and the work processes so that the work could be done within a reduced budget. Working towards a solution, he needed to apply principles of organization design to improve the efficiency of the department and then develop an action plan for the required organizational changes.