Maureen Frye at Quaker Steel and Alloy Corporation

Question 1:

The organizational culture of Quaker Steel is set to be open, friendly, and informal instead of being rigid and tedious. It is supposed to be effective and conducive to communicating and encouraging different opinions. The original intention is to make employees feel that their supervisors are more approachable, which motivates them to work harder. Additionally, “Persuasion and analyses rather than through formal authority” dominates and there is “a deep commitment to quality and customer service.” (p2). However, it is this openness and informality make operation of this company not effective. Lack of authority and direct command and control makes implementation of policies hard to put into practice.

The location of Quaker Steel also incubates unique corporate culture. Located at Holderness, a small town, Quaker Steel centers around this small town, which makes its culture intensely and effectively penetrated and be practiced.

However, despite the favorable working environment, Quaker Steel has very complicated “responsibility lines” which makes most newcomers find confusing (p2). Most salesman are self-motivated and need not follow strict guidelines. Their autonomy makes it hard to give orders and set a common goal. Salesforce has dual reporting responsibility to both district’s sales manager and product sales manager (p5). For example, from the organizational map of Exhibit 2, Frye, as an assistant product manager, does not have direct control over people who she needs to have influence on and therefore is hard to implement her plan (p10).

Question 2:

In this case, Maureen Frye performs ineffectively at Quaker Steel and the problem she encounters mostly results from herself. Although she has a strong academic background and strong support from her boss, her weaknesses are serious including lack of credibility, lack of power and lack of communication.

Maureen Frye mainly has two strengths. Firstly, her strong academic background including Materials Science and MBA lays a solid foundation for her work as an assistant product manager. Secondly, her bosses Hugh Salk and James Bethancourt fully support her plan so that Frye can get enough resources to implement it.

However, her weaknesses hinder the success of her plan at Quaker Steel. Firstly, her lack of credibility impedes the implementation of her plan. The male-dominant corporate culture and being an outsider result in many difficulties which Frye has to face at Quaker Steel. More importantly, her plan does not have detailed suggestions and bright future vision to her sales managers so that sales managers are reluctant to change the current decisions. As mentioned in the class, a successful strategy should consider analysis, vision, assumptions and social interaction, but it seems that Frye does not consider all of these factors before implementing

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