Engstrom Auto Mirror Plant: Motivating in Good Times and Bad

Engstrom Auto Mirror Plant: Motivating in Good Times and Bad

Human Behavior in Organizations

Southern New Hampshire State University

Engstrom Auto Mirror Plant: Motivating in Good Times and Bad

Introduction

Engstrom Auto Mirror Plant encompassed successes and failures when the Scanlon Plan was instituted. Plant Manager, Rob Bent, had many challenges when he started at Engstrom and thought the Scanlon Plan would be successful (Newstrom, 2015). It worked for several years but was not sustainable because financial incentives became ineffective at influencing employees. Bent may look to looking at introducing nonmonetary incentives to improve staff morale at Engstrom.

Background of Engstrom Auto Mirror Plant

Bent faced managerial and organizational issues involving distrust amongst the employees of Engstrom. Ineffective communication led to low staff morale, low productivity and quality of products, and financial losses in profit. Bent faced the crisis of low productivity and quality of products, and with great care and thoroughness by implementing an incentive plan in hopes of a propitious outcome. Bent effectively communicated the new incentive plan to the employees of Engstrom, which employees understood, and believed it would benefit the organization and themselves. Although the incentive plan had a positive effect on the organization for years, eventually the lack of effective communication led employees to distrust Bent as the plan failed (Newstrom, 2015).

Direction for Improvement

        The Scanlon Plan was a bonus pay incentive executed to successfully engage employees in giving suggestions as well as motivate employees to work more productively. Unfortunately, downturns in the organization arose, which led to failure of the plan. The focus of the Scanlon Plan was to promote staff morale, increased productivity, and quality of products while employees received compensation, a bonus, for their hard-earned work. Bent concentrated his focus on extrinsic incentives as opposed to focusing on intrinsic incentives to sustain high productivity amongst employees. If he focuses on internal incentives, he may be able to boost staff morale.

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