10.

29 Based on what you’ve read about Antle, do you agree with the problems identified by the
committee? If not, what alternative set of problems or issues do you see?

Answer: Antle is a corporation that has been in business since 1912 but has lost most of its market
shares in the past 10 years. To help the company recover from this downfall, Top-level management
appointed Merton as its Chief executive officer. For their first step towards the change, Merton
decided to evaluate the compensation policy of Antle Corp and found out that the employees were:

 Facing issues in communication with too many levels in the hierarchy

 Developed a sense of entitlement toward their promotions.
 Working below their top potential due to narrowly designed job descriptions
 Withholding important positions for too long way past their time of prime.
 Too comfortable with a secured job, resulting in lower competition among the employees
causing a reduced and mediocre output by them.
 Secondly, the firm was not outsourcing and utilizing international labor in order to lower the
cost of production or increase employee loyalty, this in return might have left them behind
the competition that currently uses this technique. (Louis & Gomez, 2020)

In our opinion, the findings presented by Merton are agreeable. Here are some of the reasons
why we think Merton might be right.

 Multi-Management layer: As per our understanding from the reading of the chapter, we
know that multi-layers of hierarchal systems only create hindrances and slow down the
process of communication and decision-making.

 Entitlement: From the reading of the case study, we realize that employees at Antle were
promoted on the basis of time they spent along with the organization rather than their
performance, this creates a sense of entitlement within employees who think they will
be promoted just on the basis of their time with the company rather than performing on
the top of their game. This is a clear case of Negative motivation.

 Narrowly defined Jobs: Job roles that are repetitive, and do not allow any scope of
broader skill set development to restrict employees to work with their full potential. This
can result in mediocrity in the workforce and output produced by organization.

 Top-level management & important positions in the organization should be given to

people who are competitive enough and perform well, this will incorporate a sense of
competition among the employees which results in better outputs.

 A sense of security in a job is great for any employee at any job, however, this sense
should never overpower the feeling of competition within a workforce, because without
it employees just provide their bare minimum to earn a check. Instead, a work culture
that promotes performance should be implemented.

 In the end, We know outsourcing was not used by Antle to promote employee loyalty,
however, companies should think about moving a portion of its production line to
outsource, as it will help bring down the cost of production and labor on the products
 All the above explanation is only possible due to the Section 10.2 (Designing a compensation
system) from the book “Managing human resources” By R. Louis & M Gomez.

References:

Louis, R. & Gomez, M. (2020). Managing compensations (Part 5: Compensations). Managing Human
Resources (9e). 10.2.
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