MHRM 6801 Week 11 Final Organizational Analysis Example

Why Bellamy Performs as It Does, and What Should Change: A Final Organizational Analysis That Carries the Term's Findings Forward, Revises Them Where Later Evidence Required and Keeps Its Recommendation to the Last Page

Student Name

Walden University

MHRM 6801: Organizational Effectiveness and Leadership

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Why Bellamy Performs as It Does, and What Should Change: A Final Organizational Analysis That Carries the Term's Findings Forward, Revises Them Where Later Evidence Required and Keeps Its Recommendation to the Last Page

The Organization and the Question

Bellamy Moving & Storage, owned by one family, runs five Colorado depots, three established decades ago and two opened since 2017. This analysis asks why Bellamy performs as it does against a working definition set in the first week of the term: moves completed on their booked date without any claim for damage, counted as a share over twelve rolling months and bounded by a margin floor. About 93 percent of moves meet that standard; at the older depots the figure is about 95 percent and at the newer ones about 90 percent. The difference is almost entirely in damage claims.

Revising the Definition

The original definition favored customers' judgment and left crews' judgment outside the measure. Later evidence showed that this was a mistake. The Week 5 assessment found that the hardest jobs drift to the least experienced crews during the morning reshuffle, and those jobs generate claims. Crews' sense of fairness is therefore not separate from customers' experience; it runs through it. The revised definition keeps the customer measure but adds a second condition: no group of crews should receive a share of large-gap moves more than half again its share of all moves. Connolly et al. (1980) argued that effectiveness depends on whose criteria are counted, and the term's evidence argued for counting crews.

The Causal Story

The term's evidence supports a chain of four links.

First, part of every estimator's pay depends on the revenue they book, and a lower estimate wins more bookings. Across the fourteen estimators, between 9 and 34 percent of estimates came in more than 15 percent short, and the busiest estimators were the furthest off. Kerr (1975) described this pattern of paying for one result while hoping for another.

Second, the move process contains no step that catches the gap. The estimate passes through booking and dispatch unchanged, the crew chief decides alone at the house and the claims desk never reports back to the estimator. The distinction between formal and informal systems drawn by Weisbord (1976) describes the result: the formal process assumes the estimate is right, and the informal system copes when it is not.

Third, claims follow the gap. Moves loaded within 10 percent of the estimate have a claims rate of 4.0 percent; those more than 15 percent over have 16.1 percent. Comparing the same crews on both kinds of job showed that crew experience makes a small difference and the gap a large one.

Fourth, the harm falls unevenly. The oversized jobs end up with the least experienced crews during the morning reshuffle, a pattern leader-member exchange theory explains: experienced chiefs with strong relationships with their managers request swaps, and the jobs left over go to those who did not ask (Graen & Uhl-Bien, 1995). At the newer depots, a market culture that measures speed and treats asking for help as weakness makes oversized loads more damaging. The transfer test proposed in Week 8 has since been run: on large-gap moves, the three crew members who moved from Aurora to Colorado Springs now have a claims rate of 13 percent, close to their new depot's. The cultural reading survives its test, though three people are a small base.

What Bellamy Does Well

A diagnosis that lists only faults misdescribes an organization. Bellamy delivers about 93 percent of its moves on the scheduled day without a claim, which is a solid record in a business where furniture travels in trucks over mountain roads. Its claims desk settles most claims fully and promptly, which the January move showed and the records confirm. Its older depots have built, without any formal program, a habit of crews helping one another on difficult jobs that protects customers' belongings. Its crews receive consistent annual training, and when estimates are accurate, crews of every tenure perform almost alike, which suggests the training is doing its job. These strengths matter for the recommendation: the problem is concentrated in one link of the process, so a targeted change can address it without disturbing what already works. A broad reform would put these strengths at risk to fix a problem that sits in one place.

What the Evidence Does Not Support

Two explanations raised during the term are not supported as main causes. Crew carelessness, raised by estimators, is not supported: experienced and newer crews have nearly identical claims on accurate-estimate jobs. Training, the owners' explanation, is a marginal factor at most, since every crew received the same training and claims still vary fourfold with the gap. Inflated customer claims are not supported as a general pattern. Long summer days remain a partial rival, adding to damage on large-gap moves, but are largely a consequence of the gap.

Confidence

The first three links rest on records covering about 9,000 moves and carry high confidence, except the commission link, which is consistent with the data but not proven. A comparison of estimators' gaps on similar jobs, controlling for house size and estimate method, would settle it. The reassignment finding rests on one quarter at two depots. The cultural reading rests on one survey and a small transfer test. Harrison (2005) recommends that a diagnosis state its confidence plainly so that those who act on it know where it is firm and where it is provisional.

Recommendation

Bellamy should introduce the overage call proposed in Week 10: when the crew chief sees that a load will overshoot its estimate by over 15 percent, the chief phones the depot manager, who re-plans the move, and one third of the estimator's commission on that move is forgone, with a quarterly bonus for accurate estimates. It should test the change through one summer at one newer and one older depot, with the other two depots as comparisons, judging it by claims on large-gap moves. Two smaller steps follow from the revised definition: depot managers should review the early-morning change log weekly, and the share of large-gap moves by crew group should be reported each month. Training, the productivity board and depot culture should be left alone until the trial shows what the overage call achieves on its own.

References

Connolly, T., Conlon, E. J., & Deutsch, S. J. (1980). Organizational effectiveness: A multiple-constituency approach. Academy of Management Review, 5(2), 211-218. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.1980.4288727

Graen, G. B., & Uhl-Bien, M. (1995). Relationship-based approach to leadership: Development of leader-member exchange (LMX) theory of leadership over 25 years: Applying a multi-level multi-domain perspective. Leadership Quarterly, 6(2), 219-247. https://doi.org/10.1016/1048-9843(95)90036-5

Harrison, M. I. (2005). Diagnosing organizations: Methods, models, and processes (3rd ed.). Sage.

Kerr, S. (1975). On the folly of rewarding A, while hoping for B. Academy of Management Journal, 18(4), 769-783. https://doi.org/10.2307/255378

Weisbord, M. R. (1976). Organizational diagnosis: Six places to look for trouble with or without a theory. Group & Organization Studies, 1(4), 430-447. https://doi.org/10.1177/105960117600100405