Management Challenges Presented in SlickOil - Case Study Example

What are the challenges facing SlickOil’s manufacturing and how should the manufacturing manager resolve these using key management concepts? Student’s Name Course Tutor’s Name Date Management challenges presented in the SlickOil case study The problems in the manufacturing department of SlickOil Pty Ltd seem to be anchored in the management approaches being used by the general manager (GM) of the company. As indicated by the case study’s author, Sheridan (2016, p. 1-2), the GM was relocated from the Hong Kong office, and does not have a clear understanding of the Australian workers’ context. In theory, it is indicated that managers can have an ethnocentric, polycentric or geocentric attitude (Principles of Management 2008, p. 13). The latter attitude is better suited for managers in a global environment, while managers with the polycentric attitudes understand the best work approaches to use in different countries and cultures. In SlickOil’s case, the GM seems to have an ethnocentric attitude, which considers the practices of her home country as more superior than the practices in Australia. However, considering that the GM is leading a global organisation, she should embrace a geocentric attitude. Her inability to understand the Australian workers’ context can therefore be interpreted to mean that the restructuring that she ordered in the company was based on her perception of what was appropriate for the global organisation, and was therefore not based on a proper understanding of the Australian work culture. The second management problem that is evident from the case study is that the GM is always trying to pass the blame to the end consumers rather than accepting responsibility and finding the right solutions to a problem (Sheridan 2016, p. 2). While her buck-passing habits are inspired by the need to protect SlickOil from costly litigation, they may injure the company’s reputation and reduce the trust that customers have in the company’s products in the long-term. According to Fast (2010, para. 2), passing the blame by people in leadership positions makes them “lose status, learn less and perform worse relative to those who own up to their mistakes”. Moreover, the blame-shifting tendencies by managers and organisational leaders lead to a loss in productive risk taking, learning, creativity and innovation (Fast 2010, para. 2; Manzoni &Barsoux 1998, para. 3). The third management problem that is evident at SlickOil is related to the proper management, planning, and controlling of the firm’s human resource. From Sheridan’s (2016, p. 2) account, there seems to be mistrust among factory floor workers. Moreover, it appears that the engineers feel that their input, skills and knowledge is not recognised by the management. Even more critical to SlickOil’s future is that work processes (e.g. quality control) are being overlooked as some factory floor workers try to earn more bonuses by getting volumes of uninspected products to the market. Combined, all the aforementioned factors indicate a failure by the management to create work processes and habits that will guarantee that the organisation has an internal culture that enhances the value of the manufactured products. Based on ideas from Clegg, Kornberger and Pitsis (2016, p. 175), it appears that the problem at SlickOil is the absence of skill differentiation, authority differentiation, and temporal stability. Through skills differentiation, the management would understand the specialised knowledge that exists in the factory shop floor (e.g. among engineers), and would thus be in a position to appreciate their input and concerns about botched quality assurance processes. According to Clegg et al. (2016, p. 175), authority differentiation refers to the decision-making responsibility that individuals have. In SlickOil’s context, authority differentiation would thus ensure that every person in the factory floor understands what their decision-making responsibilities are. For instance, the responsibility to allow products to be released to the consumer market should only be vested on one person or two people, who then would have to ensure that all products pass the quality assurance test before dispatch to the distributors. The inability of Slick-Oil’s GM to establish temporal stability among the manufacturing floor workers is also another cause of the conflict that exists in the organisation. According to Clegg et al. (2016, p. 175), temporal stability occurs when team members have worked together historically, and are thus considered to have the ability to work together in the coming days. Evidently, the case where unskilled employees are given the mandate to lead the skilled employees (e.g. the engineers) and thus end up making questionable decisions is a proof that SlickOil’s management did not consider the temporal stability among workers in the manufacturing department. The link between the management challenges at SlickOil and management concepts Gauged against the three common classical management theories – i.e. the bureaucratic management theory, the scientific management theory, and the administrative theory (Mahmood, Basharat & Bashir 2012, p. 516), the management at SlickOil would perform relatively poorly. The scientific management theory, for instance, gives importance to maximum productivity by advocating that managers could study the job and identify the best methods to accomplish maximum productivity (Mahmood et al. 2012, p. 516; Saylor 2013, p. 1). The theory further advocates for the selection and training of workers, and pegging their rewards and payments on productivity (Mahmood et al. 2012, p. 516; Saylor 2013, p. 2). The theory also suggests that workers and managers should handle tasks and responsibilities equally as a way of enhancing the economic efficiency of the firm (Mahmood et al. 2012, p. 516; Saylor 2013, p. 2). At SlickOil, it is apparent that the manager has not collected any information needed to understand how the business works. Moreover, she has not selected nor trained the employees and neither has she pegged their payments or rewards on their respective levels of performance. The administrative management theory – the brain child of Henry Fayol – is the most common in contemporary organisations and identifies the management functions (in no specific order) as coordination, organising, forecasting, planning, monitoring, and commanding (Grey 2005, p. 26; Mahmood et al. 2012, p. 517; Skaik 2008, para. 13-17). In modern management theory, the foregoing functions have been reduced to four – i.e. “planning, organising, leading and controlling” (Mahmood et al. 2012, p. 519). This theory also proposed 14 management principles, which include authority, division of work, initiative, equity, order, scalar chain, remuneration, centralisation, and unity of direction. Other principles are identified as the subordination of individual interests, stability of tenure, unity of command, and “espirit de corps” (encouraging harmony among employees) (Mahmood et al. 2012, p. 518-519). Gauging SlickOil on all 14 management principles reveals that the only attempt by the organisation at meeting these principles would be the provision of permanent work, hence satisfying the stability of tenure principle. Overall, however, the firm would perform poorly in all the 13 other principles and cannot therefore be said to uphold the administrative management theory as its guiding concept. The final classical concept for consideration in this essay is Max Weber’s bureaucratic management theory, which advocates for organisations to be divided into hierarchies and strong organisational structures with control and authority boundaries to be established (Mahmood et al. 2012, p. 519; Olum 2004, p. 8). This theory advocates for written rules and regulations in any organisation; established systems where task relationships are clear; and specialised training for relevant tasks. Additionally, the theory advocates for authority hierarchies – i.e. upper, middle and low-level management levels; clear duties; documentation of processes and procedures; fair evaluation of workers and fair reward systems; and the maintenance of bureaucracy (Cole 2004, p. 34; Grey 2005, p. 28; Olum 2004, p. 7). The case study reveals that SlickOil does not subscribe to the bureaucratic management theory either. Resolving the challenges According to Clegg et al. (2016, p. 9), management is a process that involves the communication, coordination and accomplishing of actions, which are all pursued with a particular organisational objective in mind. Management problems are categorised as structured, unstructured, and crisis problems (Raheem 2006, p. 8). The structured problems occur when sufficient information to resolve the problem is available; unstructured problems relate to ambiguities; and crisis problems emerge from unexpected occurrences in or outside the organisation (Raheem 2006, p. 11). In SlickOil’s context, the management-related problems fall in the structured category. The first thing that the management at SlickOil needs to do is to identify the objectives that the organisation needs to work towards. If the organisation wants to work towards being the leading reliable provider of gasoline-related products in the global market, for example, its management will have to strategise on how best to accomplish that objective. In other words, the company’s objectives will affect the strategies that it will adopt. Having established that SlickOil needs an organisational objective or more accurately a vision, the top level managers need to establish whether the current crop of managers are best suited to lead the organisation to its desired future state. More specifically, the organisation’s decision makers need to ask themselves if the current manager is the right person for the job. To determine the current GM’s suitability going forward, her technical, human and conceptual skills will need to be gauged. Technical skills are job-specific knowledge; human skills relate to the GM’s ability to work with others; and her conceptual skills refer to her ability to conceptualise complex situations and identify a way forward (Principles of Management 2008, p. 2). Moreover, the decision makers need to establish whether even if the current GM is the right person for the job, her skills, attitudes, and management approaches would need some improvements. Once the management function at SlickOil has been established, it is suggested that it should embark on a strategic management process. According to Naghibi and Baban (2011, p. 542), strategic management involves the development of strategies that are ideal for a particular organisation and include the four basic management functions of setting a plan, organising processes and practices, leading the organisation, and controlling different functions in the organisation. The ideal place to start for SlickOil would be to identify the company’s goals, objectives, missions and strategies. In other words, the organisation needs to identify the reason for it being in business; what it seeks to achieve; and the strategies that it will use to attain its goals. SlickOil would then need to analyse its external environment for purposes of identifying the threats and opportunities that exist in the organisation. For example, identifying the threat of litigation by unsatisfied customers is one factor that would help the organisation to craft better strategies for enhancing customer satisfaction in future. Next, the organisation would need to analyse its internal environment, since its organisational culture appears to be the genesis of most of its problems. As Agarwal and Helfat (2009, p. 283) observe, a SWOT analysis would enable the organisation to identify its strengths and weaknesses, while identifying its threats and opportunities based on its internal organisational factors. SlickOil would then need to formulate and implement strategies, after which, it would evaluate the results and determine whether in deed its solutions are working. The organisation would be at liberty to follow any of the above described management concepts, but it would be advisable to follow one that allows it to train its managers (particularly the GM); resolve the manufacturing floor conflict by identifying clear job roles and responsibilities and identifying fair methods or remunerating workers for their expertise and contribution in the workplace; and resolve the quality-related issues by identifying ideal work-flow procedures and bureaucracies. Arguably, the bureaucratic management theory is most relevant for use at SlickOil, since it would enable the management to establish hierarchies that would resolve the conflict between the engineers and their supervisors. Additionally, following the bureaucratic theory would allow SlickOil to use written rules and regulations for use in the organisation, hence making it easy for employees to follow them and for managers and supervisors to implement them. Third, establishing a system that makes the task relationships in the organisation clear as advocated for in theory would help SlickOil resolve the problem where some products are shipped out without the required quality approvals. Specialised training would also benefit employees in both managerial and non-managerial positions by equipping them with the necessary knowledge and skills needed to make specific decisions in different circumstances. Through training, the organisation would also identify supervisors whose knowledge about the manufacturing processes in the organisation does not merit them to work in the manufacturing department, thus resolving the conflict between the supervisors who offer directives and the experienced engineers who second-guess such directives. Finally, the clear duties and the fair evaluation of employees and rewards as advocated for in the bureaucratic management theory would work well to resolve dissatisfaction among some workers (especially migrant engineers) who feel that their pay is not fair. The clear duties requirements would also resolve conflicts and suspicions among employees working in manufacturing since everyone would be held responsible for any failure. References Agarwal, R & Helfat, CE 2009, ‘Strategic renewal of organisations’, Organisation Science, vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 281-293. Clegg, S, Kornberger, M & Pitsis, T 2016, Managing and organisations: an introduction to theory and practice, 4th edn, SAGE, London. Cole, G 2004, Management theories and practices, 6th edn, Thomson Publications, London. Fast, NJ 2010, ‘How to stop the blame game’, Harvard Business Review, 13 May, viewed 7 October 2016, . Grey, C 2005, A very short book about studying organisations, SAGE Publications, London. Mahmood, Z, Basharat, M & Bashir, Z 2012, ‘Review of classical management theories’, International Journal of Social Sciences and Education, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 512-522. Manzoni, J-F & Barsoux, J-L 1998, ‘The set-up-to-fail syndrome’, Harvard Business Review, March-April. Olum, Y 2004, Modern management theories and practices, Makerere University, Kampala. Principles of Management 2008, Introduction to management and organisations, viewed 7 October, 2016, . Raheem, MA 2006, Problem solving and decision making, viewed 7 October 2016, . Saylor 2013, Historical and contemporary theories of management, viewed 7 October 2016, . Sheridan, L 2016, SlickOil Pty Ltd, Case Study, MGNT110: Introduction to Management, University of Wollongong. Skaik, S. H 2008, Management theories: history and practice, viewed 7 October 2016, . Read More