Management and Bob Knowlton Case Essay

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The Bob Knowlton Case
University of Maryland University College Europe

Table of Contents

Introduction 1
The Organization’s Diagnosis 1
Proposed Strategies and Interventions 2
Evaluation of Interventions 6
Conclusion 7
Bibliography 8

Introduction
This paper will be discussing the Bob Knowlton case. First will be a discussion about what is going on in the organization. How the organization is run and the possible problems of lack of leadership and poor communication. Secondly, how to address the problems as an organizational development (OD) practitioner. This paper will discuss the different strategies of change and how to adjust them to meet the organization’s needs. The strategies discussed are structural and behavioral and how to change these in order to get the most out of the organization. Discussed are the interventions that would be utilized like employee empowerment, team building, role analysis/negotiation, stress management and third party intervention and how they will affect the organization. Finally, how to determine the success or failure of the proposed intervention. This is determined by utilizing anonymous surveys, and team meeting where they can share their results with other departments. The Organization’s Diagnosis The first area analyzed was how the organization was divided and what their relationship was to each other. Simmons Laboratories is divided up by main project heads who then oversee several projects. Some of these sections have a project head/team leader who oversee, several scientists, lab personnel, mathematicians, and secretaries (Brown, 2011). The team leader reports all finding to the main project head. However, according to the textbook the organizations self-managed work team violates the principle of unit of command (Brown, 2011). This is the principle where the team is reporting to more than one boss (Unity of Command, np), when this happens conflicts arise because the bosses are both tasking the team and this will confuse the team because they will not know who to follow and reduce the resources that are available.
Examined next, was how the organization managed its informational procedures. In this part of the diagnosis, the organization was surveyed in order to see what the problems that it was having. First, was that upper management (Jerrold) leadership style was to use his influence in order to pressure team leaders to produce results (Brown, 2011). According to the International Institute of Management’s Executive Journal, “The leadership team is the most important asset of the company and can be its worst liability” (Yones, np). Secondly, poor communication between upper leadership, team leaders, and their teams was noted with high marks (Brown, 2011). In Leadership: Enhancing the lessons of experience Hughes states that in reference to communication “Few skills are more vital to leadership” (Leadership and Change, 2012). The leadership of Simmons Laboratories have been notified of these results. They are not going to disregard the survey and are highly motivated to rectify the problem areas. They understand the consequences if the results are not corrected as soon as possible.

Proposed Strategies and Interventions This section will discuss the different strategies of change and how to adjust them to meet the organization’s needs. The first strategy that will be looked at will be structural. This is where one will look to change an organization’s framework and how each element interacts with each other (Brown, 2011). Background information Fester, was new to the company and the team, he was never properly introduced to Knowlton. According to Knowlton, Fester showed up to the laboratory after the photon team had left for the day. Knowlton was reviewing the first test results of the new photon unit, when Fester showed up asking about his project.
Bob Knowlton’s team once Simon Fester showed up did not know who was in charge of
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