Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Organizational Behaviour Case Studies
Organizational Behaviour Case Studies
Had Colvard been faced with this decision 6 months earlier, he says he
would have gone the other way. What changed his thinking was a month he spent
living in McAllen, Texas. It was part of a UPS management training experience
called the Community Internship Program (CIP). During his month in McAllen,
Colvard built housing for the poor, collected clothing for the Salvation Army, and
worked in a drug rehab Center. Colvard gives the program credit for helping him
empathize with employees facing crises back home. And he says that CIP has made
him a better manager. “My goal was to make the numbers, and in some cases that
meant not looking at the individual but looking at the bottom line. After that one
month stay, I Immediately started reaching out to people in a different way.”
CIP was established by UPS in the late 1960s to help open the eyes of
the company’s predominantly white managers to the poverty and inequality in many
cities. Today, the program takes 50 of the company’s most promising executives
each summer and brings them to cities around the country. There they deal with a
variety of problems from transportation to housing, education, and health care. The
company’s goal is to awaken these managers to the challenges that many of their
employees face, bridging the cultural divide that separates a white manager from an
African American driver or an upper-income suburbanite from a worker raised in the
rural South.
1. Do you think individuals can learn empathy from something like a 1-month CIP
experience? Explain why or why not.
2. How could UPS’s CIP help the organization better manage work life conflicts?
3. How could UPS’s CIP help the Organization improve its response to diversity?
4. What negatives, if any can you envision resulting from CIP?
5. UPS has 2,400 managers. CIP includes only 50 each year. How can the program
make a difference if it include only 2 percent of all managers? Does this suggest
that the program is more public relations than management training?
6. How can UPS justify the cost of a program like CIP if competitors like FedEx,
DHL, and the U.S. Postal Service don’t offer such programs? Does the program
increase costs or reduce UPS profits?
Case Study 2
Are Workplace Romances Unethical
1
employees. What rights and responsibilities do organizations have to regulate the
romantic lives of their employees?
Take the case of former General Electric CEO Jack Welch and Suzy
Wetlaufer. The two met while Wetlaufer was interviewing Welch for Harvard
Business Review article, and Welch was still married. Once their relationship was
out in the open, some accused Wetlaufer of being unethical for refusing to disclose
the relationship while working on the article. She eventually left the journal. Other
accused Welch of letting his personal life get in the way of the interest of GE and its
shareholders. Some even blamed the scandal for a drop in GE stock.
Welch and Wetlaufer didn’t even work for the same company. What
about when two people work together in the same work unit? Chicago advertising
firm, started dating Kevin, one of her account supervisors. Their innocent banter
turned into going out for drinks, and then dinner, and soon they were dating. Kevin
and Tasha’s bosses were in house competitors. The problem: Sometimes in meetings
Kevin would make it seem that Tasha and Kevin were on the same side of important
issues even when they weren’t. In response, Tasha’s boss began to isolate her from
key projects. Tasha said, “I remember times when I would be there all night
photocopying hundreds of pages of my work to show that [Kevin’s] allegations [of
her incompetence] were unfounded. It was just embarrassing because it became a
question of my professional judgment. ”
Case Study 3
GE’s Work-Out
The impetus for the Work- Out was the belief by GE’s CEO that the
company’s culture was too bureaucratic and slow to respond to change. He wanted to
create a vehicle that would effectively engage and empower GE workers.
2
meeting to discuss and solve problems that have been identified by employees or
senior management. Set into small teams, people are encouraged to challenge
prevailing assumptions about “the way we have always done things” and develop
recommendations for significant improvements in organizational processes. The
Work-Out teams then present their recommendations to a senior manager in a public
gathering called a Town Meeting.
Case study 4
3
Questions