The organisational change and development of Suffolk confectionary Ltd.

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ORGANISATIONAL CHANGE AND DEVELOPMENT

SUFFOLK CONFECTIONERY LTD

THE ANALYSIS OF THE SYMPTOMS

There appears to be a multitude of underlying problems that are consuming the HBS department

The department is understood to be the worst in the factory with claims and evidence of bad attitude, poor atmosphere, low motivation and low job satisfaction.

Over the past eight years a high turnover of six managers has occurred. This was accompanied with managers not meeting or being told of production targets and usually with high level of wastage.

HBS have many interpersonal/intergroup problems within the department. This is not only confined to within inter and intra parts of the packing and production staff but also between the supervisors of both the teams. This is confirmed with the large amount of time consumed by the department manager resolving conflict between both the supervisors in the packing and manufacturing department. The average amount of time consumed by conflict being 25% in private sector and 50% in public (Harvey and Brown, 2001) Although in this case it looks like more than 25% of the managers time is being spent on conflict.

Although as we will discuss shortly some conflict may actually be healthy as in the interactionist approach it is apparent that too much may actually provide what G.Morgan terms as "dysfunctional energy".

Badly handled competition between the two supervisors is also a problem. It is very common for the production department to ignore requests, concerns from packaging and proceed in increasing and meeting production targets with the comment "its my job to produce sweets" This kind of behavior would also be common with what is termed sub optimization.

Sub-optimization usually has a negative effect for the organization as a whole as the department is driving to maximum it own goals rather than that of the organization. This can be seen in the xy activity used by C.Oswick.

The lack of communication is also apparent. Despite being a highly interdependent department it appears that little communication occurs among and between each department's staff at ground level and also at senior. Much of the Packaging staff are imbedded in interpersonal conflict and the production staff communicate very rarely among even themselves.

Dissatisfaction among its manufacturer side of the department has also risen through the misunderstanding and incorrect implementation of the pay structure regarding the job grading scheme.

Despite this scheme enabling the employees to be trained in up to 40 different lines of production, many of the skills learnt depreciate due to lack of usage with the supervisor usually tending to assign staff to the areas they perform best at. Staff as a result are becoming increasingly bored with their lack of job differentiation.
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It also appears that staff are unhappy at what they call "Impossible Levels" of production being asked of them. This results in more waste as described in research by W.F Whyte in money and motivation which we will discuss later.

Finally on a more practical level there also appears to be problems with the age of machinery. Breakdowns appears to be regular which is damaging to production and will render the packaging department useless.

THE DIAGNOSIS OF THE CAUSES

There would appear to be several key factors with many interlinked and the main ...

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