ASSIGNMENT 3: CRITIQUE

ANALYSIS ON VANGUARD
ELECTRONICS CASE STUDY

Hams, Marwa, Feras

MGNT 900 Dr. Sabiha Mumtaz
Executive summary
This paper is a critique on the Vanguard Electronics case study. Vanguard electronics have been
endeavoring well in the market since their establishment in 1900 as they entered into joint
ventures and expanded the company to USA in 1998. Moreover, this paper will discuss the
issues that Vanguard faced when implementing a change strategy towards teamwork in the
different departments. Mainly Vanguard faced problems with establishing a proper decision-
making strategy where the old strategy was top down decision making and that was changed to
bottom up decision making. Moreover, Vanguard has been creating an innovative organization
culture and trying to transfer the knowledge of team work strategy through the departments to
solve their problems in efficiency and enhance their productivity. Even though Vanguard had
succeeded in implementing the change nevertheless, they have not succeeded in sustaining it. All
in all, this paper will identify and discuss the critical points that made Vanguard succeed and the
points that led to unsustainability of this success.

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Table of Contents
Introduction .................................................................................................................................................. 3
Discussion...................................................................................................................................................... 4
Decision-Making ....................................................................................................................................... 4
Problem-Solving & Innovation .................................................................................................................. 4
Teamwork ................................................................................................................................................. 6
Change Management ................................................................................................................................ 7
Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................................... 8
References .................................................................................................................................................... 9

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Introduction

Vanguard Electronics is a state of art in the electronics industry and to stay at the top, they had to
keep up with the vastly dynamic technological revolution. It was reshaped a few times to
compete in the market. There were few successful acquisitions and restructuring strategies to a
more niche dedicated to high quality products.
In the beginning, the company had important decisions that were taken in expanding out of
Germany to find support for telegraph system. Secondly, the top management decided to focus
for the quality of the product rather than the fast profit. After that, the company decided to buy
smaller companies in the USA to reach the entire world and to find a solution for the imposed
regulations. The main decision in the article was taken by Mack Ramsey (director) and Mike
Wesley (manager) was implementing a team environment in the System Test Department (STD)
and the main function to cut the cost, where the old structure in this department was standard top
to down management. After implementing the new concept for new the structure, the decision
making was changed to team decision making process.
To emphasize, they decided to create classes for training their employees and empower team
members to read educational books and review them with their feedback. They decided to split
the group by product type and shift coverage and great three teams, one team in digital central
office (DCO), second team in electronic switching devices (ESD), third team in night shift for
both lines. We can find here the decision making from the team was all agreed for both team
leader and team structure. The first decision after creating the team and the training was
completed; Wesley provided assignment for every member since any individual member
becomes a member in the lower level group.
Team decision making concept process consists of sharing the decision making within the team
by asking the team member for any suggestions or proposal and any new idea that can help the
organization to develop and reach its full potential. Another effective decision that was made by
the management is to allow the employees to rotate responsibilities between team, this helped the
members gain more knowledge and establish a trust culture between each team. The same
decision was then implemented in the Mechanical assembly department (Team environment), but
the modified it to fir the department by creating the team based on process not for the product
type as in the test department. Due to cost cutting budgets, the management decided to shut down
the training programs as well as the supplementary resources that were given to the test
department previously, which didn’t show the full support of the higher management. After
getting the best result for implemented the team environment, the vice President of the company
decided to assign money in the budget for training all employees in all departments and
implemented the team environment across all levels of the company.

Upon Wesley’s resignation, Glass and Kiefer took the decision to not assign a manager for the
department since the team leaders would send the report directly to new director Kiefer. Shortly
after Wesley’s departure, Kiefer decided to put Shari Lastarza as a manager of the assembly
department to ensure a smooth transition. Then, Lastarza seized all teamwork strategies due to
lack of guidance and control in the process.

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Discussion
In this paper, different constructs that are Decision Making, Problem Solving, Innovation and
Teamwork, were illustrated and will be analyzed through the discussion of these papers
respectively.
Decision-Making

To begin with, there are vast numbers of articles talking about decision making in teams, one of
them was “Do Individual Preferences Affect the Environmental Decision-Making Process in
Teams” by Torre, this article used an adaptation of the legislative scenario duty with eighty-four
students to share the environmental administrative by analyzing member’s subscription over the
team decision making operation, which explained how those team members with
environmentally proactive preferences have a higher participation during the decision-making
process, and as a consequence they have a greater influence” (Torre at al., 2015). Another article
is “Improving Collaborative Decision Making in New Product Development Projects Using
Clustering Algorithms” by Jaber, the purpose of this article is to simplify collaborative decision-
making process by congregation actors as stated by to the relationships they have due to their
task to decisions, Group of actors are suggest in order to give decision makers with a temporary
and integral organization prepared for making efficiently occurring cooperating decisions. These
processes have been explained through real data in a new product expansion project in the car
industry (Jaber, Marle and Jankovic, 2015).
Problem-Solving & Innovation

Firstly, a definition of workplace creativity and innovation were identified in literature through
various definitions that were summarized in the following definition; “it is the process of
generating novel/original ideas that are useful, whether ideas are useful or not is an outcome that
can only be judged after the fact. While innovation relates to the implementation of the process,
so an organization can innovate by using a non-novel idea taken from elsewhere and still have an
innovation implementation of the process (Hughes et al., 2018).
The failure of the model can be explained from the literature as an evidence that leadership style
has a great effect in developing innovative and creative work environment. As the meta-analysis
demonstrated, there is a lack of identification to a specific leadership style that effectively drives
the creation and innovation wheel. Mainly, that is because of the intertwined constructs between
leadership styles and their redundancy (Hughes et al., 2018). However, some indications in the
literature shows stronger and more consistent correlation for some leadership styles such as
Transformational Leadership style vs. Transactional Leadership styles. This can shed the light on
Wesley’s successors in innovating the process through his leadership style and motivational
mechanisms. As shown in figure 2, in the paper of Leadership, creativity, and innovation, the
motivational mechanism consists of both individual measures as well as some team measures
(Hughes et al., 2018). In researches for both Amabile's (1996) influential componential theory of
creativity and Scott and Bruce's (1994) seminal innovation paper, intrinsic motivation is
considered a key driver for work place creativity and innovation. This intrinsic motivation is a
yield of individual’s interests and involvement associated with task engagement (Hughes et al.,
2018). Moreover, this could also explain why the process wasn’t sustained when Wesley decided

4
to resign and move on. This could be due the difference in leadership styles between the team
leader and Wesley’s and their approach with regards to managing the teams. None the less, a
substantial factor that could impact the retention of the Wesley method is the “Trust- in the -
leader” factor, which studies have found to play a key role in the development and strengthening
the bond between the leader and the follower. As quoted “Higher levels of trust lessen the
perceived risk and create a psychologically safe environment which facilitates employees'
willingness to engage in creative and innovative actions” (Zhang & Zhou, 2014 as cited in
Hughes et al., 2018).
A success factor in Wesley’s way is that he tackled the problem in creative problem-solving
manner. As mentioned in literature, in the paper of ‘Leadership and Creativity: Understanding
leadership from a creative problem-solving perspective’, this core process of creative problem
solving was conceptualized as problem identification, identification of relevant information,
generation of new ideas and the evaluation of new ideas (Finke et al., 1992; Mumford et al.,
1991 as cited in Reiter-Palmon and Illies, 2004). Mike Wesley could oversee the competing
goals that occurred between different individuals while change is happening. This gave him an
edge in solving the problem efficiently through creating teams and he could see what other
individuals may ignore and fall in its trap.
On the other hand, knowledge management was not clearly practiced in Mechanical Assembly
Department, which could have affected the stickability of the change management process of
creative-problem solving. Theory showed that knowledge management is essential for
organizational creativity and innovation (Reiter-Palmon and Illies, 2004). In the same paper, the
author suggested a different cognitive aspect of knowledge management that could be an
effective method in facilitating the continuation of Wesley’s method and promotion of creative
problem-solving. Knowledge management should be practiced by leaders across their teams to
provide access to information and encourage the sharing of knowledge (Reiter-Palmon and Illies,
2004). Hence, the process is not dependent on individuals rather on the common knowledge
across the teams that would continue even after the leader resigns.

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Teamwork

Referring to the change implementation process that Mark Wesley went through in order to
implement the teamwork environment into the System Test Department, and further into the
mechanical assembly department, it shows that the most resistance was faced from the
employees themselves as their attitude towards the new initiative was negative.
Likewise, Bianey C. Ruiz Ulloa and Stephanie G. Adams in “Attitude toward teamwork and
effective teaming”, 2004 they have related the seven characteristics from Adams et al. (2002)
for team effectiveness to the attitude of individuals towards team work, and how by improving
the following characteristics 1)Productive conflict resolution 2) Mature communication 3)
Accountable interdependence 4) Clearly defined goals 5) Common Purpose 6) Role clarity 7)
Psychological safety, one could develop and attitude in the team that encourages and aims for
team effectiveness (Ruiz Ulloa and Adams, 2004).Moreover, the results were gathered using
questionnaires on engineering students and the program SPSS was used for regression of the
results. The results showed that the attitude of the team members is highly related to the seven
constructs from (Adams et al. 2002 as cited in Ruiz Ulloa and Adams, 2004). But only six of
them contributed for the variance in attitude which was excluding the first construct conflict
resolution. However, the researches have validated that by mentioning that even though there
was no collinearity between the independent variables, still conflict resolution could easily be
demonstrated through the other six constructs. Furthermore, the statistics showed that the
variance was explained by the variables by 72.4%. Also according to the multiple regression test
five of the constructs which are mature communication, accountable interdependence, common
purpose, and role clarity showed high significance and they accounted for 71.1% of the variation
(Ruiz Ulloa and Adams, 2004).All in all, as concluded from the results above and from the
situation of the team work implementation in Vanguard one can conclude that by maintaining the
seven constructs of team effectiveness at a good level one can predict and enhance the attitude of
employees toward the teamwork methodology (Ruiz Ulloa and Adams, 2004).
On the other hand, as mentioned in the Vanguard case study, the manager Mike Wesley had
introduced teamwork training to the team members right at the beginning to educate the
technicians on all the benefits they would be getting, and this played a great role in reducing the
negative attitude towards the new initiative. (Casali et al., 2019). Similarly, as cited by E. Salas
et al. in “Does Team Training Improve Team Performance? A Meta-Analysis”, 2008 "A set of
tools and methods that, in combination with required [team based] competencies and training
objectives, form an instructional strategy" (Salas & Cannon-Bowers, 1997, p. 254). This paper
examines the relationship between team training interventions and team functioning. The results
show that moderate and positive relationships exist between team training interventions and team
effectiveness and that trainings are a viable technique that organizations can make use of in order
to improve the team outcomes. (Salas et al., 2008)

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Change Management

As defined by Buchanan et al. in,“No going back: A review of the literature on sustaining
organizational change, 2005”, “sustainability is when new ways of working and improved
outcomes become the norm. Not only have the process and outcome changed, but the thinking
and attitudes behind them are fundamentally altered and the systems surrounding them are
transformed in support. In other words, it has become an integrated or mainstream way of
working rather than something ‘added on’.” (Buchanan et al., 2005). Nevertheless, one of the
major problems that Vanguard electronics faced was to sustain the change that has been
implemented by Mike Wesley in the organization. That is apparent because when Wesley left the
company without establishing the proper change process which consists of unfreezing,
implementing change and freezing (Lewin, 1951 as cited in Buchanan, 2005). As we can see that
vanguard did not freeze or institutionalize change in the organization there by leading to the
decay of the change progress. Moreover, as mentioned by Buchanan et al. in the literature review
the managerial style plays a great role and the style that Wesley used to empower and build trust
between the team members and the leaders created a trusting environment where everyone felt
valuable and decision making was the responsibility of all of them (Buchanan et al., 2005).
However, when the change agent which is Wesley left the organization and when he was
replaced with Lastarza who embodied a different managerial style and returned the old system
back which there by led to lost morale and increasing hostility and insecurity in the department
(Casali et al., 2019).

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Conclusion

The Vanguard organization has always been able to overcome the environmental technological
changes by having a dynamic and innovative organizational culture. That was apparent from
their adapting to the changing environment and how they have established their organization in a
new niche and new cities. However, in the case of implementing the team work strategy they
failed to sustain the change that was implemented even though it has shown great performance
enhancement and increased employee satisfaction. That was mostly due wrong managerial style
and not establishing a sustainability plan for when the change agent leaves. Hence the knowledge
was not transferred to another agent to continue the change process. Therefore, by establishing
the proper sustainability and ongoing incremental improvement agent in the organization,
Vanguard would continue their expansion and successful endeavor in the market.

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References

Buchanan, D., Fitzgerald, L., Ketley, D., Gollop, R., Jones, J., Lamont, S., Neath, A. and
Whitby, E. (2005). No going back: A review of the literature on sustaining organizational
change. International Journal of Management Reviews, 7(3), pp.189-205.
H. Jaber, F. Marle and M. Jankovic, "Improving Collaborative Decision Making in New Product
Development Projects Using Clustering Algorithms," in IEEE Transactions on Engineering
Management, vol. 62, no. 4, pp. 475-483.
Hughes, D., Lee, A., Tian, A., Newman, A. and Legood, A. (2018). Leadership, creativity, and
innovation: A critical review and practical recommendations. The Leadership Quarterly, 29(5),
pp.549-569.
Reiter-Palmon, R. and Illies, J. (2004). Leadership and creativity: Understanding leadership from
a creative problem-solving perspective. The Leadership Quarterly, 15(1), pp.55-77.
Ruiz Ulloa, B. and Adams, S. (2004). Attitude toward teamwork and effective teaming. Team
Performance Management: An International Journal, 10(7/8), pp.145-151.
Salas, E., Diaz Granados, D., Klein, C., Burke, C., Stagl, K., Goodwin, G. and Halpin, S. (2008).
Does Team Training Improve Team Performance? A Meta-Analysis. Human Factors: The
Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, 50(6), pp.903-933.
Torre, RJM, Aragón, CJA & Martín, TI 2015, ‘Do Individual Preferences Affect the
Environmental Decision-Making Process in Teams? The Role of Participation’, Business
Strategy & the Environment, vol. 24, no. 6, pp. 451–465.