Elektra Products Inc

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Elektra Products, Inc. Chpt. 1 Case Summary Elektra Products, an 80 year old manufacturing company has recently been facing declining shares, foreign competition and low company morale. Martin Griffin has been hired by the company to implement an empowerment campaign in an effort to revive the company. Barbara Russell is assigned as team leader of the manufacturing department. Excited about the challenge, she leads her team and together they formulate several innovative ideas on how to improve. With a hopeful and unified team, Barbara reports their ideas to the department heads and initially Martin is very enthusiastic but leaves the meeting for another business commitment. Barbara is left with the department heads, who give strong opposition to the ideas she and her team have worked so hard for. Now Barbara and her team are left feeling defeated and unsure how to proceed. Questions 1. How might top management have done a better job changing Elektra Products into a new kind of organization? What might they do now to get the empowerment process back on track? Elektra may have been more detailed and clear about what empowerment meant and looked like for the company and its employees. They are dealing with disenchanted employees who think that the upper level management does not respect their ideas and since other efforts to restructure have failed, employees are even more resistant. There is a major lack of communication between departments and instead of having each department work independently they could have organized for them to work as a team, interdependently. Also, Martin could have initially worked with each department individually to understand the challenges each department is facing and bring it back to the group so there was more acceptance about what needed to happen. Martin needed to be there to support and lead Barbara and

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