Hign Noon at Alpha Mills Essay Example
Hign Noon at Alpha Mills Essay Example

Hign Noon at Alpha Mills Essay Example

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  • Pages: 3 (588 words)
  • Published: July 3, 2018
  • Type: Case Study
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The purpose of this case study is identify key issues causing the failure of introducing new leadership to Alpha Mills, providing an analysis and recommendations on how the directors/manager could have prevented these problems. Key facts: Alpha Mills is an oil palm plantation wholly owned subsidiary of a British multinational company located in Malaysia, it supplies crude palm oil for its parent company’s detergent manufacturing business. Most of the managers have been recruited from UK, with many British ex-soldiers and policemen joining up.

In 1999, the palm oil industry in Malaysia faces many challenges with the drop in palm oil prices; costing the organisation to make losses regularly. In early 2000 a new mill manager Mr Davison was appointed, with no management experiences in agricultural product-processing mill before. His first action was to reduce production co

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sts and increase profits, such as empower operators by recognising the shifts into self-directed production teams, supervisors now play the role of assisting team members; installing machinery based on new technology; adopt more strict performance measures.

But later on, team faced problems during processing, So Mr Ang as a senior production supervisor has to teach them and solve the problems all the times. With the new tighter performance standards and reduced manpower, performance is still underperformed. Mr Ang has to tell everyone what is wrong in the team meeting without feedbacks from teams. Mr Ang push himself very hard, spend a lot of time on troubleshooting process, and became annoyed at his role, and finally losing interests and incentives on his position.

He became quieter and talks less than before. The poor performance is continued, Mr Ang was terminated.

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2. Analysis of the case Leadership: it was identified that the appointment of new leadership failed to address key issues prior to implementing multi-dimensional change in the structure of factory, implement new technology and culture of company. Before change, it is essentially for new manager to communicate effectively with employees and three supervisors, especially when he had no related management experiences in a similar industry.

Communication is the means to creating an innovative and stable environment. Mr Ian Davision is mainly a task-oriented behaviours manager has no awareness in people-oriented leadership; he assigned specific tasks, made employees follow rules, set goals to achieve performance capacity. Therefore, employees get very low job satisfaction, even though, the productivity will be improved, in the long term, employees will lose motility in the role. The embedded organisational and national culture needs to be considered when developing plans for change.

Because the manager’s past experiences were from Egypt where the culture is totally different from Malaysia. The culture of Alpha Mills requires nurturing and support during the change; but the manager just made decision without considering other supervisors and employee opinions, especially for Mr Ang who is working 35 years in that factory already. 3. Solution or recommendation action and justify A good manager should be high on both people and task oriented behaviours. Mr Ian Davision should balance between those two issues.

He needs also to establish good relationships with employees; gaining trust, respect and confidence. Higher employee satisfaction is important to reach a higher performance. It will also need extensive time education and reinforcement whilst transitioning into self-directed teams. Also, the supervisor should be given certain level of

manpower to manage the team work other than just assisting them. He had no knowledge about culture in workplace in Malaysia. he should get to know culture of Malaysia because societal cultural values and practices will affect leaders decisions and actions.

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