Dennis Mitchell is the plant manager of a company in northern Alabama that produces interiors for luxury yachts. The ethnicities of his workforce are mixed: about 40% are white, 25% African American, 15% Hispanic, 10% Libyan, and 10% Asian (Korean, Chinese, and Vietnamese). As for gender breakdown, 60% are women. Twenty percent either do not speak English at all or they have very poor English conversational skills. His departmental supervisors report that they have grave difficulty in giving orders and having those orders carried out.
Lately the business has been in a downturn. A soft economy together with growing foreign competition has had a serious effect on sales. As a result, last week Dennis reluctantly had to cancel one of the three production shifts and lay off 70 workers. The plant is one of the primary employers for a small town of 15,000 and the layed-off workers have little prospects of gaining work locally. That incident only exacerbated an already volatile workplace environment. Just last month, when Dennis expanded the duties of the sewing room foreperson to include the cut-out department, the workers downed their tools and walked off the job. The threatening language they used at the time gave Dennis cause to believe some intended to physically damage the property so he summoned the local sheriff's department for protection. That inflamed the group more and it took some skillful negotiating on the part of an independent mediator to calm things down and get the workers to return.
Responding to pressures from stockholders the company CEO is concerned about sustainability, and is now pressuring Dennis to turn things around. Dennis would like to adopt a more participatory style of management, but is not certain how to go about it, particularly since he perceives that there is a lack of trust between management and labor.
a. What are some of the principal issues that need to be articulated before this company can begin to build a new workplace culture? That is, if you were summoned to this plant as a consultant, what are the first and most important questions that you would need answered?
b. In building a supportive culture how can this company overcome the language barrier? How can it begin to build trust between management and the employees?
c. How could the team structure be used to advantage in an environment like this?
d. How could the management of this company use its human resources to help it gain competitive advantage?
e. If the company does find it necessary to downsize, how do you think its approach would differ under these two perspectives:
(i) Losing personnel is like writing off assets on the company balance sheet.
(ii) Losing personnel is like shedding costs from the company profit and loss statement.