Brown Oscar

Oscar Brown

MT302 Organizational Behavior

Unit 9 Final Project

Professor Cindy Wessel

July 12, 2013

I have worked for an organization that fostered positive change through rewards, true “employee empowerment”, and an “open door” policy. The rewards included simple tokens of appreciation for effort above and beyond what was expected for the job. For example, the Vice President of a department would give an employee a $200.00 dinner at the restaurant of their choice for staying late to complete a task that was important to a customer. Another reward used quite often was movie tickets given to employees for outstanding performance. These simple rewards worked to create an environment where managers were enabled to use consistent, positive motivation rather than negative motivation techniques. Each and every employee (including the President of the company) was empowered and required by the company as part of their job description to make “on the spot” decisions for customers. This meant no approval was needed to do what was right to satisfy a customer need. For example, if a customer called the company to seek assistance for an installation support issue, and it was determined that expensive equipment they were attempting to install was faulty, the employee had full authority to immediate ship new replacement equipment overnight (charged to the company) so that the customer could resolve the issue quickly. On one occasion I had to ship over $10,000.00 dollars worth of equipment overnight to a customer after discussing their situation on the phone. The “employee empowerment” policy fostered a sense of business ownership and pride in all employees because the policy conveyed trust in the employees ability to make the right decisions. Business growth due to the employee empowerment policy was phenomenal, routinely exceeding 20% growth annually. The “open door” policy meant that any employee could approach any company executive at...