Road to Hell

Mollee Collins

MBA 633-T303

Case 1 Analysis

Description

John Baker is the Chief Engineer of the Caribbean Bauxite Company of Barracania in the West Indies, he has been with the company for 23 years, in many different countries. John Baker is being promoted and he needs to prepare his successor, Rennalls. Rennalls is a fairly young and new to the company, Baker suspects he has a repressed racial consciousness. Baker wants to get to the bottom of it and Rennalls gets offended during the interview and immediately puts in his resignation.

Diagnosis

Renalls resigned due to the verbiage in the interview by Baker. Baker offended Rennall’s country and culture. Baker received word from expartriate that Rennall’s was rude. Baker has noticed a difference of actions when Rennalls is involved with Barracanians and Europeans. Baker told Rennalls about the incident and how great it would be if he could get past it. Rennalls immediately denied the claim. Instead of letting it go, Baker decided to give one last shot at getting the point across to Rennalls. Baker said Europeans have had 300 years experience in the commercial world while the Barracanians had only had 50 years.

Theory

The conflict theory is a great evaluator for this case. The Conflict theory has 5 main stages they are: discomfort, incident, misunderstanding, tension, and crisis. In order to get to the bottom of the conflict you have to figure out what led to the crisis. The discomfort in the Case began at the start of the interview, you could tell Rennalls was immediately uncomfortable as he was tensed. The incident would be Baker trying to get to the bottom of the racial claim. When Rennalls denied it, Baker made a statement which although true could be hurtful to a native of the country. Rennalls was upset and misunderstood the message Baker was trying to get across. Tension began building inside Rennalls the more he thought about it, which ultimately led to him “exploding”-writing a...