Case Analysis

Hickling Associates Ltd.

Problem statement

Hickling Associates Ltd. appears to have a number of OB-related problems that negatively impact its employees and the entire organization, which could result in loss of productivity, low employee commitment and reduced organizational effectiveness as a whole.

At the management level, the obvious issue is that the business owner, Mr. Hickling , is not doing a good enough job at managing employees and creating productive/supportive work environment for his people. Simply put, Hickling makes an impression of a careless and arrogant character who is totally out of touch with the reality of his own business.

At the employee level, the biggest issue is the low employee commitment and morale, counter-productive work behavior, such as presenteeism and lack of corporate citizenship. Moreover, most employees seem to have developed a form of “loyalty” to the organization by staying with the firm and doing bare minimum just to keep their jobs safe.

At the organizational level – the problem is the lack of effectiveness in such areas as knowledge sharing, absence of High-Performance Work Practices and questionable organizational values/ethics overall. In addition, there is a lack of adequacy in the reward system, which seems not to give proper credit to top performers like Tony.

At the job level, main issues include significant amount of stress to any aspiring employee like Tony, who wants to take charge of things. Furthermore, some jobs like Tony’s involve little task control which makes it difficult to achieve certain goals. All of these job-related factors result in low empowerment.

Analysis

Many of the problems above suggest that Hickling Associates Ltd. scores very low in terms of organizational effectiveness across several important dimensions. Although it is clear that any given organization is only as good as people who are working there, it is usually the senior management/ business owners who have...