THE MUSHROOM FACTORY

MGMT 2008 Organizational Behavior

Tutor: Sherwin Ellis

Kenny Bowen – 400001395
5/11/2018
Table of Contents
Background ................................................................................................................................................... 2
Problem Statement ....................................................................................................................................... 3
Analysis, Major Issues, Discussion ................................................................................................................ 5
Ineffective Communication....................................................................................................................... 5
Motivation................................................................................................................................................. 7
Attitudes to work ...................................................................................................................................... 9
Possible Alternative, Pros and Cons............................................................................................................ 10
Recommendations ...................................................................................................................................... 12
References .................................................................................................................................................. 13

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Background
The ESCO Company is a Midwest manufacturing departmental organization which holds and

accessories department that focus’ specifically on producing specialized industrial which aid in

complimenting the high volume standard products of the company. authority in the creation of

claim to fame modern things whose intention is to compliment the organization's high volume

standard items. The Accessories department at first had full range of control over its products

which includes the customer service and relations. In 1972 this department changed severely

introducing two groups which are the Product Engineering and Manufacturing Engineering

groups, the former continued handling the product inception, prototype production and production

start-up as well as customer service and relation, and the latter handling the products during the

production stage. In 1973, to add to the already detrimental problems of the manufacturing

department, the company had purchased a few small manufacturing plants and began transferring

the operations to these newly acquired factories, which was also putting them out of jobs.

Employee satisfaction during this time was severely damage, morale and work efficiency suffered

greatly. The following year, efforts were made were to reduce the damage that was done by

reverting the decision but this proved to be futile due to the fact that not long after the reversion,

the company was merged with another division of its parent company and as a result of this middle

and upper management staff were frequently let go.

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Problem Statement
The Core Problem Identified in this case study was the poor Leadership displayed by some of the

managers and leaders of The Mushroom Factory. (Winston and Patterson, 2006) defines leadership

as the selection, equipment, training, and influencing of one or more followers who have diverse

gifts, abilities, and skills and focuses the followers to the organization’s mission and objectives

causing the followers to willingly and enthusiastically expend spiritual, emotional, and physical

energy in a concerted coordinated effort to achieve the organizational mission and objectives.

(Robbins and Judge, 2018) also defines leadership as having the ability a group of persons towards

the achievement of some kind of vision or goal.

Figure 1
Department
Manager
Richard Long

Group A Section Group B Section Group C Section

Leader Leader Leader
John Ritch George Kelley Valentino Rockford

5 Engineers 4 Engineers
5 Technicians
2 Technicians 3 Technicians

Figure one shows the leaders and managers within the organization. They were assigned based on

technical specialization and existing work load. Group leaders were encouraged to develop their

own ideas for accessory products, and bonus checks were distributed each year to the group that

originated the most productive new ideas.

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Each of the leaders within the department had differing leadership style. John Ritch was more of

a Democratic (Participative) Leader and he was arguably the strongest leader in the organization,

he always got the job done and was the one leader that all the engineers and technicians looked to

for help, whereas Valentino Rockford could be seen as having Charismatic Leadership but having

a terrible work ethic, his group would get assigned tasks completed and even win some merit prizes

but Valentino’s work was mostly done for him by his employees or John Ritch. George Kelley had

an Autocratic Leadership style, he had years of experience but he never got the job done

sufficiently and had nothing to show to be rewarded with the merit prizes that were awarded to

groups, management stopped assigning engineers to his group because he kept running them away

due to his outdated way of doing things and his stubbornness. Richard Long the department

manager showed more of a bureaucratic leadership style, as he is characterized as being a more

“by-the-book” type of leader but not as successful as one would think he should be given his

credentials due to his shyness and lack of communication with employees as a result of that. In

terms of leadership, John Ritch was the only Valuable asset the company had as a leader, Valentino

Rockford, George Kelley and Richard Long all had fundamental flaws with their personalities

which in turn affected their style of leadership and as a result of that the company was not as

efficient as it could be.

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Analysis, Major Issues, Discussion
Ineffective Communication
Communication is something that no group or organization can exist without, it is the transfer and

understanding of meaning. The meaning must be understood and only then can information and

ideas be conveyed. (Robbins and Judge, 2018). Robbins and Judge go onto say that there are four

different forms of communication, downward communication flows from one level of a group to

a lower level and is used by group leaders and managers to allocate goals, provide instructions,

explain policies and procedures, talk about problems and give feedback. Managers need to bring

clarity to the reasons why certain decisions were made. Upward communication flows from a level

of a group to a higher level, this is where employees can air out any concerns or current problems,

provide feedback to the higher-ups and make them aware of goal progress. Upwards

communication is useful to managers as it can be used as a tool for conjuring ideas on how to

improve work conditions. Lateral Communication flows between employees of the same level

within the organization in the same workgroup or different workgroups or any other horizontally

equivalent workers. Lateral Communication saves time and facilitates coordination and they can

be formally sanctioned or informally created which they mostly are the latter. The company

suffered a breakdown in downward communication because Richard Long had great difficulty

communicating with his subordinates and he could not delegate authority to people that he hardly

knew, because of his inadequacies many company functions went undone. Upward communication

saw its fair share of problems as well, George Kelley was the prime offender of these problems,

due to his stubbornness and his jealousy of not being department manager, he was very

unreasonable and belligerent towards his subordinates which caused them to have little respect for

him, if any at all. As a result of this group B often broke the chain of command and sought out

John Ritch to assist them with their dilemmas. Downward communication saw further breakdown

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when Top Management decided to share the company changes with the executives, which includes

Richard Long, who we already know has difficulty communicating, and it was suggested that they

leak the information to their departments, Richard gave the message to George Kelley assuming

that he would get the word around but George told no one and when the change happened, all the

employees except George was caught by surprise. Lateral Communication worked against the

company after the change happened, Val’s group learned of the better working conditions that the

product development group had as it was told by the old members of Val’s group who had been

put into Product Development, this caused the manufacturing department to become jealous and

hostile.

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Motivation
According to (Robbins and Judge, 2017) Motivation is the processes that account for an

individual’s intensity, direction and persistence of effort towards attaining a goal. It is the

enthusiasm of an individual to reach the specified organizations goal, regarding their personal

goals. In an organization, the role of management along with the head of a department is to allocate

activities to accomplish goals (planning, organizing, leading, controlling). Motivation is important

to improve the quality of work that is achieved within an organization. In the Mushroom Factory

Case, the McGregor X and Y theory of motivation could be used to analyze the company.

McGregor described the X Theory as the workers who have little ambition, dislike work, want to

avoid responsibility and need to be closely controlled to work effectively. While he described

Theory Y as a positive view that assumes employees enjoy work, seek out and accept responsibility

and exercise self- direction. (Robbins and Coulter, 2016). In the case, George Kelley is an

examples of McGregor’s Theory X because he believed that he was entitled to the department

manager positions. When he did not receive the promotion to department manager and was instead

placed as the head of section B, he took this as an insult. His problem with section B was that they

were never given any of the interesting assignments due to the lack of technical depth. George

distrust in his technicians made him believe that they were unable to do anything correctly. He

believed that for it to be done correctly he had to do majority of the work himself. George Kelley

never gave his full potential because he believed that being head of section B was beneath him,

also never accepting help, but always complaining that he never received help lead to the

technicians not trusting him and taking any problems they had to John Ritch head of Section A.

John Ritch and his employees is an example of McGregor’s theory Y. John was a pleasant, likable

man who got along with all the members of his team. He was an excellent engineer, he did not

assume that he would always have the best or only answer, but understood that the technicians

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would have more experience and a more practice approach to solving problems within the

organization. John was quite a competent worker, that understood that there needed to be a distance

between leaders and their group member. He stated that he liked to talk about other things during

his break than the Accessories Department.

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Attitudes to work
“Attitudes can be defined as providing a state of readiness or tendency to respond in a particular

way.” (Mullins, J. L., 2005). (Robbins and Judge, 2017) also states “Attitudes are evaluative

statements—either favorable or unfavorable—about objects, people, or events. They reflect how

we feel about something. When you say “I like my job,” you are expressing your attitude about

your work.” In the saving phase of the case study, Richard Long had more communication issues

because he was incapable of interacting with his workers. He pretty much disregarded the

employee complaints and dismissed them by just replying with answers such as “it is company

policy, there is nothing that can be done to rectify the situation, or just plainly telling them to be

quiet and go by the book. As a result of this everything started falling apart, job dissatisfaction was

at an all-time high, as employee morale got lower “accidents” around the workplace began

happening, equipment was being destroyed, pilferage occurred, absenteeism and turnover started

to increase.

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Possible Alternative, Pros and Cons
Some alternatives that could be looked at to help the business would be:

The implementation of an HR department which would serve to be effective in the distribution of

roles and duties to employees, for example where George Kelley kept running away his engineers,

had there been an HR department, they would be able to air their grievances towards George.

Pros:

 Employee satisfaction would be somewhat better because there would be a dedicated

department to listen to and try to solve their problems related to other employees of all

levels therefore relieving some of the burden of managers and leaders.

 An HR department would help in the hiring process of the organization; it would allow for

persons better suited for positions to be found.

Cons:

 There would be a cost to hiring qualified persons to head and work within the department,

training those persons and installing the HR management system overall.

 Added layers of communication could be complicated.

 Effectiveness of the department may be reduced due to the lack of trust the employees

would have.

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Better Qualified Managers

Pros:

 Hiring more qualified managers similar to John Ritch with his Democratic Leadership

style, looking at how successful Group A is, the company would benefit with more

managers that have decent work ethic and motivates their employees.

 Managers who will listen to their employees when they voice their concerns and use that

information to create a better work environment.

Cons:

 It is difficult to find persons who would have similar technical expertise of John Ritch.

 It would be very time consuming to find such a manager, as well as gauging their

organizational knowledge and expertise.

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Recommendations
1) The company could either opt to train the leaders who have poor work ethic, but seeing as

the problems with them lie deep within their personality it would be better to get rid of

them because they are a hindrance to the organizations effectiveness. It would be better

suited to find motivated persons with quality work ethic to hold these positions.

2) Information sharing should be more of a priority, as the lack of communication resulted

heavily in the downfall of the organization, more effort should be placed into keep

employees up to date on information.

3) Collaborative problem solving should be done through the employees and leaders of certain

groups having a clear path of communication as it pertains to problem solving.

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References
Kortmann, S. (2012). The Relationship between Organizational Structure and Organizational

Ambidexterity. Wiesbaden: Gabler Verlag, p.13.

Robbins, S. and Coulter, M. (2016). Management. 13th ed. Essex: Pearson Education Limited, p

495

Robbins, S. and Judge, T. (2018). Essentials of organizational behavior. 14th ed. Harlow: Pearson,

pp.217, 276.

ROBBINS, S. and Judge, T. (2017). ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR. 17th ed. UPPER SADDLE

RIVER: PEARSON, p.113., pp.247.

Winston, B. and Patterson, K. (2006). An Integrative Definition of Leadership. The International

Journal of Leadership Studies, [online] 1(2), p.6. Available at:

https://www.regent.edu/acad/global/publications/ijls/new/vol1iss2/winston_patterson.doc/winsto

n_patterson.pdf [Accessed 1 Nov. 2018].

(Robbins, Stephen and Judge, Timothy, 2008) – Organisational Behaviour

(Mester, Cheryl., Visser, Delene., Roodt, Gert,. 2003) – ‘Leadership style and its relation to

employee attitudes and behaviour’ (Mullins, J. Laurie,. 2005) – Management and Organisational

Behaviour. (Schermerhorn / Hunt / Osborn / Uhl-Bien,.2010)-Organizational Behavior.

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