Case Assignment

(Questions at the bottom)

As the day shift supervisor at an Ontario steel plant, you summon the six students who are working for you this summer doing whatever you need done (sweeping up, sandblasting the inside of boilers that are down for maintenance, running errands, etc.). You walk them across the plant to a field where the company stores scrap metal leftovers. The area, about the size of a football field, is stacked with organized piles of metal. You explain that everything they see has just been sold. Metal prices, which have been depressed, have finally risen enough that the company can earn a small profit by selling its scrap.

You point out that railroad tracks divide the field into parallel sectors, like the lines on a football field, so that each stack of metal is no more than 5 meters from a track. Each stack contains 390 pieces of metal. Each piece weighs 42 kilograms (approximately. 92 pounds) and is about a meter long and just over 10 centimeters high and 10 centimeters wide. You tell the students that working as a team, they are to pick up each piece, walk up a ramp to a railroad car that will be positioned next to each stack, and then neatly position and stack the metal for shipment. Thats right, you repeat, 42 kilograms, walk up the ramp, and carry the metal onto the rail car.

Anticipating their questions, you explain that a forklift could be used only if the metal was stored on wooden pallets (it isnt), if the pallets could withstand the weight of the metal (they would be crushed), and if you, as their supervisor, had forklifts and people trained to run them (you dont). In other words, the only way to get the metal into the rail cars is for the students to carry it. Based on an old report from the last time the company sold some of the metal, you know that over an eight-hour shift workers typically loaded about 30 to 31 pieces of metal parts per hour. At that pace, though, it will take your six students six weeks to load all of the metal, and the purchasing manager who sold it says it must be shipped in two weeks.

So, without more workers (theres a hiring freeze) and without forklifts, all of the metal has to be loaded by hand by these six workers in two weeks.

Questions - Short Answer

1. Which management idea(s) is most relevant to this example?

2. Describe the elements of a bureaucratic organization.

3. Discuss the approach to management that sees employees as organizational resources.