QUESTION ONE (25 MARKS)

Ethical decision making is the process in which you aim to make your decisions in line with a code of ethics. To do so, you must seek out resources such as professional guidelines and organizational policies and rule out any unethical solutions to your problem.

With reference to the above statement, evaluate the steps in the ethical decision-making process.

QUESTION TWO (65 MARKS)

Read the following case study and answer the questions that follow:

Managers at Cape industries, a clothing manufacturing company in the Western Cape, were struggling to improve productivity and profits. If things did not get better, they and their 500 employees would be out of work. One last effort to turn the company around was a shift to teamwork.

Top managers told managers to abandon the traditional assembly system, where workers performed a single task, such as sewing zippers or attaching belt loops. In the new team system, teams of 30 to 50 workers coordinated their activities to assemble complete garments. Employees received training to help them master new machinery and attended brief team-building and problem-solving seminars for an afternoon and it took a month for everyone to attend a session. As an introduction to the seminar, facilitators told the employees that the new system would improve their work lives by giving them more autonomy, eliminate the monotony of the old assembly system and reduce the number of injuries they receive from repeating the same task.

Cape Industries also revised their pay system. Previously, the workers output determined their wages. A skilled worker could frequently exceed his or her quota of belt loops or fly stitching by 20 percent or more, which resulted in a considerable increase in wages. However, in the new system, the total output of the team determined an individual workers wages. In many cases, top performers received far lower wages because slower, inexperienced, or inefficient team members affected the teams performance adversely. Skilled workers were frustrated because they had to wait for slower colleagues to complete their part of a garment, and they resented having to help less-skilled workers to speed up the production process.

Supervisors, who were unaccustomed to the team system, provided little direction except for telling their subordinate to resolve workflow and personality issues amongst themselves. The idea was to empower employees to have more control over their own work. The experiment in teamwork was a dismal failure. The quantity of garments produced per hour declined 25 percent from pre-team levels. Labour costs went down, but the morale was terrible.

Source: Adapted from Daft, R.2005. The leadership experience. 3rd ed. Canada: Thomson, South-Western 421 -422.

Questions: 2.1

Why do you think the experiment in teamwork at Cape Industries was unsuccessful? (35)

2.2 Analyse what the managers could do to promote more effective teamwork at Cape Industries. (30)