Case: Making Difficult Decisions in Hard Times
Read and discuss the following scenario:
You are on the top management team of a medium-size company that manufactures cardboard boxes,
containers, and other cardboard packaging materials. Your company is facing increasing levels of
competition for major corporate customer accounts, and profits have declined significantly. You have tried
everything you can to cut costs and remain competitive, with the exception of laying off employees. Your
company has had a no-layoff policy for the past 20 years, and you believe it is an important part of the
organization’s culture. However, you are experiencing mounting pressure to increase your firm’s
performance, and your no-layoff policy has been questioned by shareholders.
Even though you haven’t decided whether to lay off employees and thus break with a 20-year tradition for
your company, rumors are rampant in your organization that something is afoot, and employees are worried.
You are meeting today to address this problem.
Tasks to perform:
1. Develop a list of options and potential courses of action to address the heightened competition and decline
in profitability that your company has been experiencing.
2. Choose your preferred course of action, and justify why you will take this route.
3. Describe how you will communicate your decision to employees.
4. If your preferred option involves a layoff, justify why. If it doesn’t involve a layoff, explain why.
Organizational culture comprises the shared set of beliefs, expectations, values, norms, and work routines
that influence how members of an organization relate to one another and work together to achieve
organizational goals.
In essence, organizational culture reflects the distinctive ways in which organizational members perform
their jobs and relate to others inside and outside the organization. It may, for example, be how customers in a
particular hotel chain are treated from the time they are greeted at check-in until they leave; or it may be the
shared work routines that research teams use to guide new product development. When organizational
members share an intense commitment to cultural values, beliefs, and routines and use them to achieve their
goals, a strong organizational culture exists. When organizational members are not strongly committed to a
shared system of values, beliefs, and routines, organizational culture is weak.
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Tasks to perform:
1. Develop a list of options and potential courses of action to address the heightened competition and decline
in profitability that your company has been experiencing.
2. Choose your preferred course of action, and justify why you will take this route.
3. Describe how you will communicate your decision to employees.
4. If your preferred option involves a layoff, justify why. If it doesn’t involve a layoff, explain why.