Dick Spencer Analysis

Dick Spencer Analysis

The assigned case study has us take a look at the career of Dick Spencer and the history of how he developed into a vice president for a large manufacturing firm. The case study begins with a conversation between Dick and a few of his friends as they reflect on how he could have possibly made better managerial decisions while working at the Tri-American Company. The case study details the style of Dick's management and describes multiple problems that he faced when transitioning between his various job roles.

In this analysis, I will describe some of the issues with Dick Spencer's management choices and also offer informed recommendations on what steps he could've taken to better resolve those issues.

Micromanagement

Micromanagement is the first major issue that I found when reading this study. Dick seemed to harness a leadership approach that embraced micromanaging and it led to very low employee morale. A micromanagement leadership style is often attributed to creating a constant environment of dependency, inefficiency, lack of confidence, and eventually poor morale (Presutti, 2006). The reason why this can lead to failing morale is that it creates a form of mental laziness in employees' minds. This laziness is due in part to their thinking that no matter what they do, a micromanager will have them redo it according to what he views as being the "right way" (McDonough, 2005). Employees work more effectively when they feel like their ideas are valuable, and micromanagement often has a way of diminishing that value to the point of being abusive at times (McDonough, 2005).

Micromanagement is deemed as being a compulsive disorder that generally attributes itself to unsure and self-doubting individuals (White, 2010). In Dick's case, this manifested out of his feeling that Modrow's corporate office was "waiting for Dick to prove himself or fall flat on his face." The shift from successful salesperson to a managerial position also resulted in this as Dick was historically used to a self-managed job role and thus often corrected problems himself prior to his new position. Micromanagers typically concern themselves with specific day-to-day details as a means to "keep them in the loop" as Dick hadn't completely let go of his former non-managerial job behavior (McDonough, 2005).

Dick' management style was most likely due to his type A personality. This helped him to succeed at his initial sales position. Kunnanatt (2003) describes this personality as being highly competitive, ambitious, aggressive, and often times impatient. While his competitive nature drove him to land large contracts as a salesman, it did not have the same advantages after transitioning into his managerial role. The emotional traits of hostility, anger, and irritable behavior also associated with this personality type (Kunnanatt, 2003) caused him to react in a negative way when presented with his first major incident.

During the siding department incident, Dick demonstrated the full extent of his micromanaging habits. He demanded that the foreman remove the step of cutting the siding prior to disposing them since he was able to bend the material, and he did not view the original method as being cost efficient. Dick seemed unable to trust the performance of the foreman or others below him, showing yet another negative trait of micromanagement (White, 2010). Dick, like most micromanagers, was monitoring his workers too closely and spending unnecessary time on one particular department and the methods that they were using, rather than dealing with more strategic and policy-level decisions that befitted his position (White, 2010).

Dick's constant walking tours of the plant caused supervisors to develop mistrust for him as they feared what newly observed details Dick would bring up in a future meeting from what he had seen. Supervisors who previously enjoyed proper vertical communication with their management would now seek to hide their mistakes as they feared being punished for the smallest details of their jobs (Presutti, 2006). This led to the resentment that Dick experienced, during his first year at Modrow, as the supervisors correlated his visits to him being "just lonesome and looking for a friend."

Culture Shock

Another problem that Dick Spencer faced was that of "culture shock" when he was reassigned abroad. Intellectually he may have been prepared for the challenge but real life poses a different scenario. Political and economic events combined with labor issues can make managing abroad unpredictable (Feldman & Tompson, 1992).

Another surprise for managers is the fact that a foreign assignment does not give them a competitive edge in moving up the corporate ladder. Many times what results is that they are left out of the loop and "out of sight, out of mind" (Feldman & Tompson, 1992).

Management theories are also influenced by cultural constraints. In Germany it is the engineer that is held as the hero with business schools being virtually unknown. From an American perspective, Germans have a weak managerial presence yet their economy performs at a higher level (Hofstede, 1993).

In Japan, the permanent worker group, those aspiring to life-long employment, form the core of the Japanese enterprise. France, on the other hand, has a "cadre" system where the well-schooled form the cadre and those who are not part of that group, form the workers.

Holland's approach is that of an open-ended exchange of views although what looks like consensus is sometimes fraught with mediocrity (Hofstede, 1993).

Dick Spencer's London assignment thrust him into a role where he wasn't entirely accepted either in the community nor the plant. Although tasked with making changes to modernize that branch's operations, Dick had superiors which pushed back against his recommendations. He held this position for eighteen months until he was suddenly promoted to manager of a newly-acquired plant in Birmingham.

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