The Timken Company Case Study

Question 1

The main message of Timken to its employees is a message of abrupt and primary changes in the way the company has been run. The company is in need of an 8% across the board salary cut. This means that not only the workers, but also the management will feel the heat. The company may also need to be lean on laying off some of its employees whom it considers a burden on the company. There is an increased competition in the market, therefore, adopting to strategies that may not look feasible in the short term, but have positive impact in the long run  may be an answer to the problems faced by the company. Leadership have a strong role to play when applying changes on such magnitude (Kotter, 2008).

Question 2

Management knowledge play an important role in the progress of a company. Same is the case with technology and its effective adaptation in organizational operations. At the present, Timken lacks both. There is little use of the new techniques of management and there is less absorption of technologies to improve organizational processes. The company has a top to bottom management approach in which the top management makes most of the decisions and the lower management and other workers are only involved in their implementation. This is a bureaucratic management structure that needs to be changed soon. For an organization to progress in the present age, it is important that it involved all its relevant employees in its decision making and develop efficient communication channels with which the employees can effective interact and share ideas that could lead towards the achievement of organizational goals.

Question 3

Research suggests that organizations should facilitate the creation and implementation of innovation among its employees (Lendel & Varmus, 2011). In my personal opinion, the top management should not doubt the capabilities of the lower staff and who knows, who has a great idea that could be implemented in an organization to make it more efficient. I worked as an intern in a local library. The library did not have a proper channel of communication for different employees to deliver messages to each other. I mean that if the employees from one shift wanted to deliver a message to the employees of the other shift, they would be dependent on the word of mouth strategy. Like they would tell other employees to deliver their messages to the targeted person. I introduced a new form of communication. I put a register over there and if anyone wanted to deliver a message to another employee, they would write their message down and the other employees would then read it and answer it on that page of the register. It was not easy to convince the chief librarian as he was concerned about the privacy of the messages, but I convinced him as I told him that this register will be used for official conversation and unauthorized people would not be able to see it. This strategy worked and improved the communication process among the library staff.

Question 4

There are many ways in which messages to the top management and other employees can be delivered via media mix. For example, social media is one of the ways that has been used by different organizations for inter organizational communication. CEO’s can utilize social media to convey their messages more efficiently than before. LinkedIn is an example of social media platform utilized by many organizations. Leadership forums and staff forums can also be utilized to achieve organizational changes and achieve both long term and short term goals.

References

Kotter, J. P. (2008). Force for change: How leadership differs from management. Simon and        Schuster.

Lendel, V., & Varmus, M. (2011). Creation and implementation of the innovation strategy in the             enterprise. Economics and management, 16, 819-825.