Orgb 1105 - Packaging Department

The biggest root cause of these symptoms is that the packaging department lacked team composition, which is a strong indicator for team effectiveness. The packaging department did not have a sole supervisor that the employees could directly report to or get support from. The sawmill department’s supervisor and the planer department’s supervisor handled the management of the packaging department in a shared effort. However, both supervisors would spend limited time managing the packaging team due to their established role in their own departments and that the packaging department was located at a different building. The sawmill and planer departments both increased productivity over the last few year, which indicate that both supervisors were more invested in their own departments, instead of dividing their workload to operate the packaging department efficiently.

An important part of team composition is establishing and reinforcing team roles. By setting roles for each individual, everyone is held accountable in achieving team goals and objective because they are expected to perform in their position. Roles also help maintain a relationship within the team because team members would need to cooperate and coordinate with each other to reach their team goals. Team roles are usually formed and reinforced by team supervisors therefore without a direct supervisor for the packaging department; the department greatly decreased their productivity. Without a supervisor to monitor the employee’s behavior and performance, the employees developed poor job performance habits such as having extended breaks and leaving early from their shifts. The employees of the packaging department learnt that the sawmill department’s supervisor and the planer department’s supervisor rarely visit the packaging department, which created a norm in the department that it was acceptable to have an informal schedule. Moreover, there were no consequences to their actions, which further anchored this dysfunctional team norm.

In addition, the lack of reinforcement in team roles led to social loafing. Social loafing occurs when employees exert less effort in teams than when working alone. Without the guidance of a manager to establish concrete team roles for each individual in the packaging department, it is difficult to identify individual’s job performance from the team because the whole team is working towards a common goal. The absent of a fulltime supervisor also prevented employees from the packaging department to receive accurate feedbacks about their job performance or get any acknowledge of their effort. Consequently, social loafing would increase because individual’s job performance is hidden among the team, which result to employees feeling less motivated to perform in a high level and more likely to rely on other employees to complete the task. In this case, the employees of the morning shift would leave unfinished tasks for the employees of the afternoon shift.