Engstrom Organizational Behavior

Organizational behavior is the study and application of knowledge about how people, as individuals and as groups, act with in organizations. An organization’s behavior will correlate their effectiveness with task achievement and it’s understanding of organization behavior is crucial in determining how to improve productivity. The human behavior can influence a company either negatively or positively depending on the company and the way they interact with employees and how the employees feel they are treated.

At Engstrom Auto Mirror plant they had a decline in productivity plus production of low-quality mirrors, after being very successful for a period of time. The company put the Scanlon plan in effect just before their decline in business

The Scanlon plan rewarded their employees with bonuses based on the improved performance of the entire company. The worker’s productivity improved with the Scanlon bonus plan in effect, but later declined to the point that there were no longer bonuses given to the employees. Due to the lack of bonuses employee morale and behavior at the plant were negatively impacted.

When Ron Bent took over Engstrom he did not analyze the causes of the decreased worker’s performance. Instead, he focused on ways to improve the worker’s productivity, during that time the company was in transition to new technology. Due to the new technology the workers started anticipating job insecurity with the inception of new technology that may omit some positions. Job temporariness decreases corporal loyalty (Robbins, Judge, Millett, & Boyle, 2013). These insecurities would have changed the perception of the workers towards the organization and, in turn, alter their behavior. Had the company changed the perception of the employees it could have changed their behavior and possibly improve their performance. Ron did not consult workers on ways in which productivity could be increased before he introduced the Scanlon plan. Due to his decision making and having not included the

Equity is achieved through comparison of input and output ratios experienced or enjoyed people in similar situations (Robbins, Judge, Millett, & Boyle, 2013). The workers at Engstrom did not appreciate this, and they compared themselves with the supervisors who they thought their input was less important. Mistrust is a consequence of perception of inequity at work, the management should have explained to the employees the basis of establishing the sharing of bonuses. The failure of explaining the sharing of bonuses negatively influenced their behavior and culminated in decreased production in the