Case Study Assignment: Analyzing Three Key OB Issues and Recommending Solutions

Susan Taylor’s new job was not turning out as happily as she had hoped after her successful interview nine months earlier. Her previous position was as a production controller in a large pharmaceutical company where she had responsibility for some forty-production staff and three supervisors, all women.

Everything then had worked smoothly — staff knew what they had to do, rarely questioned any instructions or changes in routines, respected their supervisors and usually achieved their group production bonuses. Her own production manager had been an experienced older man, who put her under no pressure unless production targets were not being achieved.

It had all been remarkably easy to manage. In putting herself forward for the new job, Susan had wanted to find an extra challenge at work, and to make use of her academic and professional training, which had earned her a very good first degree in chemistry and part-qualification for her professional pharmaceutical qualification.

However, in her new post Susan was distinctly uneasy. Although still a young woman of barely thirty years of age, she had been promoted to take charge of a product development unit composed mainly of research-orientated chemists and pharmacists. The unit was small comprising ten staff in all, of whom five were considered as very bright research workers with good career prospects in front of them, two were junior researchers just out of university, and three staff was people who had spent some time in either production or sales environments.

All in all the company’s research director reckoned that he could not have put together such a well-rounded and capable product development group. He had a well-balanced team with a variety of skills and experience, and a team leader who was not only well-qualified academically, and could therefore keep up with the research specialists, but, crucially, was aware of the practical implications of product development's activities for the people working on the production lines.

The reality of the situation, however, was that Susan felt consider¬ably less than satisfied with the way her unit was working — there seemed little sense of being a team, people (especially the research-orientated types) kept questioning why they were being asked to do certain tasks and seemed disgruntled at the 'interference' in their work by their new manager, whilst the more broadly-experienced members began to display open exasperation at the research specialists' lack of understanding of the needs of production and marketing.

Susan’s research director had already spoken to her as tactfully as he could about the delay in getting one particular product onto the production line, but at this stage had not offered any form of help. Susan had already held a series of meetings with the team to brief them about targets for product development, links with production and marketing, and health and safety issues. 

• Three key OB issues in the case

• Relevant OB theories for each of the OB issues

• Recommendations for action to improve each of the three issues.