All-American University: Peppercorn Dining Case Study - Leadership

This case study examines the challenges faced by Peppercorn Dining, a restaurant located on the All-American University campus, focusing on issues related to employee recruitment and retention. The restaurant struggled with staffing shortages and a lack of qualified workers, exacerbated by the competitive job market. Consultants Roger, Lynn, and Erica were brought in to analyze the situation, employing interviews and observations to understand the root causes of the problems. The consultants interviewed various employees, including managers, full-time staff, student workers, and supervisors, to gather qualitative and quantitative data on operations, employee morale, and communication. The analysis revealed issues such as poor communication between staff, a centralized management structure, and conflicts within the dining unit. The case concludes by suggesting a shift towards decentralized management, improved communication, and activities to enhance interaction between management and workers to improve employee morale and attract more student workers.

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Case study: Peppercorn Dining
6/19/2019
System04129

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Case study: Peppercorn Dining
Introduction
The case is about Peppercorn Dining restaurant, who face the problems related to the
recruitment of qualified worker and challenge of retaining them. An organization’s consultants
Roger, Lynn and Erica mutually set out a strategy that is interview and observation. Through the
respective strategy consultants wants to enhance the employee’s morale and job satisfaction. The
case summary depicts the practices that the consultants undertook, to analyze the problems of
Peppercorn Dining.
Case study: Peppercorn Dining
The partners of Square One Consulting launched Peppercorn Dining restaurant, at All-
American University campus. The main objective of Peppercorn Dinning is to enhance
productivity and to improve employee’s morale through refine organizational working
environment, so that Peppercorn able to attract more student workers. Peppercorn’s manager,
Drew Randall described the currently operating situations that is “staffing is a nightmare”.
Recruitment and retention becomes the biggest hurdle, including this shortage of qualified
employees due to the prosperous Reagan years and operation issues.
The group of three consultants, Roger, Lynn, and Erica developed a contract to examine
the roots of all the problems, through interviewing and observing (Waddell, Creed, & G, 2017).
Observation technique of survey helps identify on the job behavior of workers, which act as a
main component in achieving organizational goals. Employees including management, full time
worker, union workers, temporary works, and student workers considered as survey population
( Doody & Noonan, 2013). Collection of qualitative and quantitative data covers operations
functions, serving, kitchen, cahiers, dishwashers and suppliers. Employees already know the
aims of the research, as Drew introduced all the three consultants to the workers in advance for
familiarity also state the authentic reason, so that meaningful interaction can take place.
On the first day- interview held with Doug, the dinner chef. Doug point out so many
things like Larry, the professional supervisor plans the menus through computer and sometimes
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Case study: Peppercorn Dining
because of computer errors, menus gets changed even at the last minute. Dough gets little
uncomfortable in speaking front of his supervisor and its clearly depicts the poor relationship
between workers. Apart from all these, he talked about the student workers, that only some
student worker are serious for their work.
Interviews held on day second by Roger with a student in which, student share his
experience that in past time Peppercorn Dining consider all student managers, students
supervisors and students workers as a member of an organization but now students feel
disesteem while working in organization. This situation occurs mainly because of poor
communication between the superior workers and student workers (Shmailan, 2015). With all
these professional supervisor, Larry Pendleton disclosed her organizational problems that she
has to stay at entrance where the temperature is very low, mainly in winters there is
unavailability of facilities to protect her from cold. As a result, it affects the employee morale,
lowered confidence for a respective job and, forced her to think about some other better options.
The analyzed data depicts that organization is highly centralized that results all the
decisions made by higher level of employees in hierarchy and subordinates have to follow them
forcefully. It directly affects the employee’s performance and organizational growth (Tang, Dai,
& Meuse, 2013). Some particular strategies should establish by consultants like propose of
workshops, luncheons, retreats and other activities in which superior management and workers
gets chance to interact with each other.
Conclusion
Peppercorn’s organizational structure causing the main problems, with this consultants also
notice lack of communication among employees, conflict in dining unit worker and poor
interpersonal relationship among superior and subordinate. To attract more student workers at
Peppercorn Dining, style of decentralize management should be adopted and tries to align the
employees feedback while achieving the organizational goals.
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Case study: Peppercorn Dining
Bibliography
Doody, O., & Noonan, M. (2013, May). Preparing and conducting interviews to collect data. Nurse
Researcher, pp. 28-32.
Shmailan, A. B. (2015). The relationship between job satisfaction, job performance and employee
engagement: An explorative study. Issues in Business Management and Economics, 1-8.
Tang, K. Y., Dai, G., & Meuse, K. D. (2013). Assessing leadership derailment factors in 360° feedback:
Differences across position levels and self other agreement.‐ Leadership & Organization
Development Journal, 326-343.
Waddell, D., Creed, A., & G, T. (2017). Organisational Change: Development and Transformation.
Australia: Cengage Learning Australia.
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