The organizational issues in the Engstrom Auto Mirror Plant: Motivating in Good Times and Bad stems from both the organization itself and the people employed at the plant. The main organizational issue in this study is that the plant manager, Mr. Bent, refuses to see that the Scanlon plan is no longer working and needs to be replaced by a more suitable program or adapted to the current situation the plant is in. The Scanlon plan, while a fine one for a production department, operates too much on a custodial model of organizational behavior. Newstrom (2015), states that the employees in the custodial model “become psychologically preoccupied with their economic rewards and benefits and as a result…, become well maintained and reasonably contented.” So long as the rewards and benefits continued to come in the employees remained happy and productive, but as soon as the bonuses became less frequent the more irate the employees became. In the Engstrom Plant case, these benefits and rewards bred passive cooperation; productivity went down so rewards weren’t as frequent which in turn affected employee morale and productivity lowered even more especially since the employees were no longer producing at their full capabilities. All of this was happening at …show more content…
While Mr. Bent tried his best to keep downward communication open and as transparent as possible, explaining the causes in decline and possible layoffs, his employees did not keep up with upward communication. Instead they stopped participating in management and began filtering. The communication gap became more apparent in the form of distrust, when employees received the detailed explanation about the process of calculating their bonuses and could not understand the jargon that was used; thinking that they were essentially chasing a “carrot on a stick” and that supervisors shouldn’t be getting as big a bonus because they “don’t work as hard”