Business Management

In the Montego Bay leadership development case, Lisa Mahoney is a store manager at Montego Bay, a retailer that sells distinctive women's clothing in an upscale shopping mall in Pasadena. As Mahoney was looking at her quarterly sales report she noticed that her sales were down 3.5 percent from last year. Knowing that 20 underperforming stores would be closed, Mahoney wondered how she could protect her store from closing and the employees from being laid off. While meeting for lunch with Theresa Daley, the operations director of Montego Bay, Daley mentioned that she wanted to try a new computerized scheduling system in her store. This new system would increase productivity and reduce payroll costs. The program would assign the employees that have higher performance with the hours with that had the most customer traffic. The software would also improve labor efficiency and increase sales.

As the new system was introduced Mahoney's employees started to complain about their hours being cut based on the new scheduling system. This put all of the employees into a frantic mode that caused them to be aggressive with customers and to push products on customers that they did not want. Although this new system had motivated the employees to hustle, work hard, and get more sales, it was not the way that Mahoney had wanted it to happen. This had left the employees feeling devalued, and it shattered the friendly work environment that had once existed. Although Mahoney was disappointed in the effect the system seemed to have on the morale of the store, the sales had increased and the employees were more motivated to work. The new system had increased sales by 2.8 percent and decreased labor costs by 5 percent.

Before the new system was put in place, the company’s organizational culture was that one of a Clan. Employees were involved and each one was accommodated in making their schedules. Even though sales were important there was always a need to satisfy each of the employees’s needs and desires. Employees were able to communicate and work well as a team while helping each other accomplish their goals. After the implementation of the new system was installed the company had a dramatic change in its organizational culture to become one of Achievement. The Achievement culture has a clear characteristic that distinguishes it from the rest; a company with achievement culture focuses on the organizational goals which in this case are sales, growth and profitability.

The change to achievement culture has had some positive and some negative effects within the organization. This new computer scheduling system has caused employees to work harder due to the fact that the new system schedules employees based off of their sales per hour, dollars per transaction, and other daily performance metrics instead of their needs and wants. The new system gave the most successful employees the most hours during the stores busiest times. This