MHRM 6801 Week 3 Organizational Symptom Review Example

Three Departments, Three Stories, Eighteen Months of Records: A Symptom Review That Sorts Every Complaint at Bellamy by What the Claims, Dispatch and Payroll Data Actually Support, Leaving Causes Unnamed

Student Name

Walden University

MHRM 6801: Organizational Effectiveness and Leadership

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Three Departments, Three Stories, Eighteen Months of Records: A Symptom Review That Sorts Every Complaint at Bellamy by What the Claims, Dispatch and Payroll Data Actually Support, Leaving Causes Unnamed

The Stories

Every department at Bellamy Moving & Storage has an account of what is going wrong, and every account blames another department. The estimators say crews are careless with furniture, especially at the newer depots. Dispatchers and crew chiefs say estimates are routinely too low, so crews arrive to find more than they were sent to move. Crew chiefs add that dispatch schedules too many long days in summer. The claims desk believes some customers inflate claims. The owners, separately, believe crews need more training. This paper sets each account beside eighteen months of records, from July 2024 through December 2025, and sorts the complaints by what the records support. Harrison (2005) distinguishes symptoms, the problems people notice, from causes, which must be established by evidence; this paper deals only with symptoms.

The Records

Three sources were used, all kept routinely by the company for other purposes. Claims records list every damage claim with its date, depot, crew and outcome, about 640 claims across roughly 9,000 moves. Dispatch sheets record each move's estimated volume, the volume the crew chief recorded at loading, the crew assigned and the hours worked. Payroll records show overtime by crew member and week. Interviews with two people from each department supplied the stories; the records were then pulled without telling anyone which complaint each would test, so no department could prepare its numbers in advance.

Sorting the Complaints

Table 1

Complaints Sorted by What the Records Support

Composite organization. Records from July 2024 through December 2025.

What the Sorting Shows

Three complaints are at least partly supported by records: claims differ by crew and depot, estimates often fall short of what is loaded and long days cluster in summer. None of these patterns is small, and each would matter even if the others did not exist. One complaint, inflated claims, is not supported as a general pattern. One, the need for training, cannot be tested from these records because every crew received the same training.

The sorting also shows that departments are each describing a real pattern seen from where they sit. Estimators see claims files that name crews. Crew chiefs see houses that do not match the estimate. Each story is true about what it sees and incomplete about the rest. Argyris (1990) described how people in organizations protect themselves by locating problems elsewhere, which makes accounts like these predictable and makes records more useful than any single department's view.

What This Review Does Not Do

This review does not name causes. It does not say whether low estimates cause claims, whether newer crews are less skilled or whether long days lead to damage. Those questions are connected: the newer depots may receive more of the jobs where estimates fall short, or longer days may coincide with larger loads. Pfeffer and Sutton (2006) warn that organizations often act on the most plausible explanation instead of the one the evidence supports. Untangling these will require comparing like with like, such as the same crews on jobs with accurate and inaccurate estimates, which later weeks will do.

Limits

Loaded volume is recorded by crew chiefs, who have a reason to report it as larger than estimated. A sample of moves should be checked against the bill of lading weights before the estimate gap is treated as settled.

References

Argyris, C. (1990). Overcoming organizational defenses: Facilitating organizational learning. Allyn and Bacon.

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

Pfeffer, J., & Sutton, R. I. (2006). Hard facts, dangerous half-truths, and total nonsense: Profiting from evidence-based management. Harvard Business School Press.