Case Study Analysis: Engstrom Auto Mirror Plant: Root Cause Analysis
Dr. Gibbons
Terae Phelps
01/03/2021
Southern New Hampshire University
Organizational Issues:
Enstrom Auto Mirror Plant has several reasons that are a direct result of underlying issues
which has always been present within the company. Even before the Scanlon Plan was executed.
There is an overabundance of serious issues that construct the root causes of the dire situation
Enstrom Auto Mirror Plant is faced with. To guide the company in the right direction, Enstrom
Auto Mirror Plant must address these issues at the source and rectify these matters to have any
hope of progressing the a sustainably profitable entity
Organizational socialization is one issue that has drastically hindered the employees trust
in the company. Trust is a crippling cornerstone, necessary for the company the thrive. The
Scanlon plan was initially set up to allow and encourage employees to make suggestions on ways
to improve the efficiency of the plant (Newstrom, 2015). The intention is to ensure all
suggestions produced by employees would be submitted and reviewed by a committee within the
plant. The indirect purpose is to create an organizational culture that will encourage employees to
continuously participate in the company, raising their morale levels and job satisfaction. When the
Scanlon Plan was first implemented, this worked as expected, pending that the company was
profitable producing a healthy bottom-line within the industry. Although when the company
started going through hard times, management was not able to adhere to the full scope outlined
within the proposed and accepted Scanlon Plan.
Root Causes
The employees embraced the new culture with enthusiasm, as well as, made active
suggestions on ways to improve the company. During the profitable times, Enstrom Auto Mirror
Plant was more than willing the accept suggestions from employees and implement them in the
company's culture. This action resulted in the employees being more willing to make suggestions
due to seeing some of their own ideas implemented and creating a branch in their organizational
culture with the belief that suggestions would yield rewards (Newstrom, 2015).
It would appear, that the root cause, resulting in the sudden downshift in the Engstrom
Mirror Auto plant, is the environment itself with in the organization. The work culture has never
taken into consideration, therefore, producing temporary solutions to a seemingly terminal issue
The Scanlon plan acted as a band-aid to boast morale and productivity temporarily. Never
completely addressing the cultural issues. The Enstrom Auto Mirror Plant's solution to solve the
issues with productivity, truncated moral, employee engagement, the employee's willingness to
participate, and long-standing issue with communications, placed to much reliance in the Scanlon
Plan. An incentivized plan, that should have been used as a temporary solution to get Enstrom's
Auto Mirror Plant moving in the right direction. Once on the correct path, additional incentive
plans or alterations should have been made to make the plan easy to understand, attainable, and
most importantly, provide Enstrom Auto Mirror Plant with a way to make good on the