Case Study on Organizational Behavior

Running head: CASE STUDY ON ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR
Case Study on Organizational Behavior
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1CASE STUDY ON ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR
Case Study
I worked for an organization last year. It was a medium enterprise and had more than
200 employees in two branches. When I started working there at first everything seemed fine.
After a month or two, I realized that a tension was growing among the employees. I was a
new employee and thus could not understand what was causing that tension. After a week the
reason became clear. A new manager was appointed to manage the operations of the floor.
Earlier, the office worked based on the teams and their leaders. For the last few months the
turnover of the company was receding slowly. The managers and the board of directors were
trying to find out the reason. After much analysis they decided that it is probably due to
leadership issues that the production was decreasing. The leaders were given too much
autonomy and the authority had decided to change that. The leaders managed the teams and
reported directly to the authority. Now, the scenario was about to change. The employees it
seemed were not enthusiastic about the situation as they thought that new superior means
more complications for them. The team leaders too, were not much pleased as they now had
to report to the floor manager as well as the directors. When the new manager, Sam, arrived
the next week, he received a stunted welcome. He was an enthusiastic fellow and tried to
mingle with the employees freely. Sam had a successful career till now. In his previous
company he had shown outstanding performance in leading teams that had different
compositions and dynamics. To get acquainted with the workforce, he called meetings where
he asked team leaders about any questions that they might have. The team members too were
not enthusiastic in giving him any insight to the workings of the company (Schippers, West
and Dawson 2015). This created a problem for Sam. He decided to take matters into his own
hands and called a meeting where he placed many instructions as to how he wants the work
scenario, what goals and objectives each employee must target and how they should work to

2CASE STUDY ON ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR
reach there. He gave clear and specific instruction that left no room for the employees to
improvise. He thought that this will increase the productivity as the clear goals will give them
direction. What he did not expect was the subsequent fall of production at a drastic level as
well as the sudden increase of employee attrition in the organization. Within matter of weeks,
20 employees resigned and there were rumors that many more were planning to follow their
footsteps. The directors were also worried and were contemplating whether the decision to
appoint Sam had been right. Due to his past success record, they decided to give him another
chance. Sam too, was desperate. He started to dig deeper into the problem and found out that
the teams that have reacted most strongly were quite old. The members have been working in
the organization for a long time and the team leaders too were leading those teams for a long
time. The problem became clear to him at that instant. He decided that he would have to
change some of his strategies and the existing structure to succeed in his job.
In his research he saw that the composition of the team has been the same for a long
time. It has been effective till then as no changes were made in the organizational structure
and hierarchy (Gharakhani et al. 2013). The team members were unaccustomed to change
and thus when Sam arrived they reacted negatively towards it. Sam knew that he would have
to patient and make them understand the need of such changes. It took him a few months but
slowly everybody came around. Slowly, the teams started to cooperate with him. Meanwhile,
a large project came to the company that needed all the workforce to be involved to pull it
off. Sam was the operations manager and thus was given the responsibility to plan the
execution of the project. He decided to call a meeting and recreate teams according to the
teams and delegate tasks from the project according to those skill sets. Four teams were
created and each had a specific task. The team leaders too were responding better and trying
to work with the new structure. The project was delivered successfully. Eventually, when it
was time for the yearly performance appraisal, all the directors were pleased to find that the