Conflict in Approaches of Corporate Management - Essay Example

Strategic Approaches to Corporate Management: Ineffective without Communication An organization is affectedwith technological, economic, social, ethical, political and legal factors. Due to tough competition, companies always aim to satisfy customers by producing quality products and services. Today's business firms always assure customers and those people living or surrounding their factories of their awareness in environmental management. There are various reasons that would invite companies' top management to formulate and implement strategies that will commence, evaluate and expand business operations globally. Therefore, companies are influenced to apply innovative approaches to their corporate management. Strategic approaches are assessed based on its impact upon its profitability. Through implementing strategic management approaches in ones company, the need for customer satisfaction will be met, not only locally but world wide. The advantages in applying strategic approaches to corporate management include gaining of customer trust, thus, increases revenue, attaining companies' objectives of increasing profitability, extending or enlarging the market, reducing of unit costs, and acquisition of knowledge on new technologies and skills and business practices. Continual improvement of the company's system, good organizational management and producing of quality products are also few of the advantages of applying or implementing strategic approaches of corporate management in ones company. In this paper, conflict and ineffectivity of these approaches will be identified and discussed. Due to the rapid growth of industries and its competitors, these innovative approaches are systems that will help build, improve and enhance a company's process flow. However, if these systems are not being supported, it would also lead to disadvantages and misunderstanding between top management, workers and laborers and instead of providing quality products and services to its workers, it may have the possibility to contradict the standards. Some of the disadvantages include large costs for third party auditors and new innovations and confusion of systems. ISO 9001 Quality Management System is one of the most popular strategic approaches to corporate management. This model of quality management system approach acknowledge the facts that quality results are achieved by producing a company manual, complete with process flow, work procedures and work instructions, proper recording and keeping of quality records and tracking of inputs and outputs. Another popular strategic approach to corporate management is HACCP or Hazard Analysis of Critical Control Point. This approach focuses on Food Safety and analyzing the critical points of which any physical and microbial elements can contaminate the food. Through HACCP, these contaminations can be prevented. One popular banana exporting company is certified with both ISO 9001 Quality Management System and HACCP. Through these certificates, they gained the trust of their customers. Unfortunately, starting week 41 of the year 2005, its production had dropped down, producing only 60% of its forecasted production. Its standard box/stem ratio of 1.5:1 which means 1.5 boxes packed in 1 bunch has dropped down into .60:1 which means .60 boxes in 1 bunch. The production estimates reported only 11,000 boxes packed per week but the figures being submitted to the marketing and shipping department is 15,000 boxes packed per week. This event has been accompanied by 2 months of bad weather producing millions of non-functional leaves which affects the banana fruits resulting to a dozen truck full loads of rejected bananas. Being an ISO 9001 and HACCP certified, there is a standard number of weeks, number of functional leaves and calibration of bananas to be packed but due to its diving production, the top management informed the Quality Assurance department to disregarded the standards and packed under calibrated or too old bananas. Upon shipping these bananas to the market, the company received lots of feedback due to ripe bananas and bruises. Due to the low income, the company has also disregarded the HACCP principles of producing Personal Protective Equipments for its laborers and haven't provided them with PPE's for a couple of months. This has been found out by its third party auditors and was recorded as an offense. In this company, the marketing and shipping department is a two hour drive away from the plantation. Unable to visit the place everyday, the department relied in the use of the telephone. The situation of the company stated above is a result mostly of the lack of communication and of providing with wrong information to other departments just to protect or hide the actual rate of production. We might say that communication consists of transmitting information from one person to another. In fact, many scholars of communication take this as a working definition, and use Lasswell's maxim ("who says what to whom to what effect") as a means of circumscribing the field of communication theory. In those respects the domain would largely be covered by information theory. (Wikipedia) According to John Ford, a variety of options are available to deal with workplace conflict. It is worth noting that each of the approaches is suitable in circumstances, and that the ideal is a coordinated and supportive array of interest and rights based options for dealing with all types of problems as early as possible. Interest based options are those that attempt to address the real needs of the parties rather than defining the problem solely in terms of legal rights. (2002) Em Griffin has expounded the definition given by Lawrence Frey, Carl Botan, Paul Friedman, and Gary Kreps in their research methods text. These writers define communication in a way that describes the essence of the process without being biased against any particular way of examining the subject: Communication is the management of messages for the purpose of creating meaning.3 This broad definition regards communication as an intentional activity, while not ruling out accidental outcomes. It gives equal weight to messages and meanings and opens the door for studying both content and relationships. The limits of the field are set sufficiently wide by this definition to include verbal and nonverbal symbols. In other words, the definition describes what communication scholars have really studied. (1997) Every person in a company is a member of the team. A company is one team joined together and working together to meet every company's goal. In every company, communication is very important. Without communication, activities won't be tracked down, employees will be uninformed, and a company will be in chaos. Innovative approaches of corporate management are also important. Through this, there will be a continual improvement of the company's system, good organizational management and the company will be able to produce quality products. These three aspects go hand-in-hand in a good company. However, reviewing the practices of the banana exporting company stated above, two aspects have been sacrificed to achieve or compensate the other aspect. In this case, in order to protect the company's goal and reputation of achieving the standard boxes being packed, they play with the figures and with the use of communication, reported the wrong figures and disregarded quality assurance standards in able to attained the desired amount of packed boxes. However, in the first quarter of the year 2006, these false practices have resulted to a conflict in the work place and conflict with the products being served. Excerpts from Dana College's Communication Theory Class Fall of 2001 says that communication Theory plays a very important role in our everyday lives, whether we realize it or not. Theory helps us understand things and predict what might happen communicatively. Theories help us make sense of our own experiences. Through theories we assign meaning to what is going on. N. R. Hanson once said, "The paradigm is not the man who sees and reports what all normal observers see and report, but the man who sees in familiar objects what no one else has seen before" (cited in Littlejohn, 1999, p. 3). These communication problems hamper the smooth flow of the company's operations and a corrective and preventive action should be made in order to solve the company's problem. John Ford has discussed several corrective actions to be able to solve the communications problem of the company. Arbitration is faster, less expensive, and more informal than the legal system. The parties to the dispute select the arbitrator, and determine the level of legality and formality. (Ford, John, 2001) In a company, there is always a panel of internal neutrals. Together with an open door policy, where employees are allowed to circumvent normal organizational hierarchies to voice complaints and procedures, these problems will be raised and discussed and therefore be provided with an action. Monthly plantation reviews should also be conducted wherein all representatives of each department should attend so that the problems of each department are open to every one to avoid surreptitious events. Information and all available data should be open from the top management up to the supervisor level and performances should be reviewed. To avoid communication problems, plantation inspection should also be conducted by top management so that they themselves will be well aware of the severity of the unaddressed situations that has been constantly raised during meetings. After the problem has been raised, actions have been taken and trainings had been conducted. By directly addressing the communication problem and the conflict, actions have been taken with the help of the whole team and because of the performance reviews, an employee can develop a sense of ownership which after all is one of the keys to an effective communication in order to avoid conflict. Reference: Ford, John. Process Options for Workplace Conflict Management. May 2002. Mediate.com. 28 April 2006. http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/research/r_mla.html Griffin, Em. Talk About Communication. 1997. A First Look at Communication Theory. 30 April 2006. http://www.afirstlook.com/archive/talkabout.cfmsource=archther Dana College's Communication Theory Class. Importance of Communication Theory. 2001. 30 April 2006. http://www.dana.edu/lschreib/Students/Theory%20Papers/what_is_theory.htm Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. 28 April 2006 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_theory Read More