Strazzanti is president of Com Corp Industries, a $13 million, 100 employee metal stamping shop he incorporated in Cleveland in 1980. He’d started out as amachine operator with a tool and die manufacturer, rapidly climbing the ladder to become general manager of another stamping company. Along the way, he didn’t just dream about what he’d change if he were a company president. He figured out ways to make his dreams a reality. [Dateline Cleveland, 1977] Packie Presser was vice president of the notoriously demanding local chapter of the teamsters’ union. The chapter controlled a metal stamping plant where Strazzanti had just been promoted from floor supervisor to general manager. Strazzanti recalls: Two coworkers marched into my office. It was a hot summer day; they had had a few beers at lunch and were fired up. They worked hard in the warehouse and saw the engineers working in the air conditioning and getting paid a lot more. They didn’t think it was fair and wanted more money. I knew I was in a no win situation. If I told them I thought they were being paid fairly, that’s what they expected; they were going to argue, and they weren’t going to be happy with the results. If I gave them more money, I was being unfair to everybody else. So I took out a legal pad and I told them to write down whatever they wantedto be paid. Thirty days from that date, they would get that pay—with one caveat. During the 30 days, I would shop for replacements for them. If I could get highly qualified people to work for anything less than that number, they would have to take a hike. They asked for time to think about it and never came back with a number. A lot of these guys think that if a company fills an order for a million dollars, it earns a million dollars in profit. I realized that if workers understood how a company earned a profit and how it had to be competitive, a lot of the resentment between managers and employees could be eliminated. And they needed to understand that if they improved their job skills, they could receive higher wage.
a. How does the sharing of information in an organization contribute to the empowerment of employees in a decentralized organizational structure to enhance their performance and that of the organization?
b. In a decentralized organization, how does the sharing of information allow employees to better understand their organizational roles relative to the roles of others?
c. In a decentralized organization, how does quality control depend on widespread distribution of information?