Engstom Auto Mirror Plant: Motivating in Good Time and Bad

ENGSTOM AUTO MIRROR PLANT: MOTIVATING IN GOOD TIME AND BAD

Mialea Davis

OL 500 Human Behavior in Organizations

Instructor: Paul Brown

Introduction

Engstrom Auto Mirror Plant story began as a privately-owned business established in 1948, in Richmond, Indiana. With the intent of maintaining a small distribution of manufactured mirrors for trucks and automobiles, Engstrom Auto Mirror Plant managed to remain successful for 50 years. However, on May 14, 2007, the plant’s driven success came to a halt due to a crisis both Ron Bent and his assistant, Joe Haley feared, decline in productivity and quality. Surprisingly, this crisis was overlooked in prior years due to business had been good; over a seven-year period: sales had quadrupled. (Beer, 2008).

In 1998, Engstrom Auto Mirror Plant not only underwent new management due to the previous manager’s lack of technological skills to find sophisticated solutions in a timely manner to improved production lines but also endured low employee morale. As a result, Ron Bent was introduced as the new plant manager in hopes of changing the culture of the organization. On the heels of the crisis, June 2006, Bent laid off 46 of his 255 employees and those who remained were informed and encouraged to vote on his newly cultural shift towards the path of the Scanlon Plan an incentive program.