FOODCORP REFLECTION PAPER
1. INTRODUCTION
In FoodCorp simulation, held on 22 nd of November, my position was VP Marketing Services and I worked under the head of SVP Service Group. Service group consisted of 4 people including one senior vice president and three vice presidents. As VP of Marketing Services, I was responsible for marketing communications in general. I also mention about organizational structure of FoodCorp to establish a basis for my latter discussions. FoodCorp has a matrix structure and also has a number of committees like executive committee, acquisition committee, new business committee and distribution committee.
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I made and advocate those decisions based on the analysis I made according to the data I had.
Non-Operational Group Meeting: As non-operational group members (SVP Service Group, VP administration and VP Marketing Services) firstly we reviewed our previous discussions and then we discussed about the matrix organizational structure of FoodCorp. When we were discussing structure of the organization, our president also attended our discussions.
3. REFLECTIONS
Reflections about President’s Attribution and Operational, Non-Operational Groups: This simulation was very important for me to understand again the fact that how a leader is important for the effectiveness of a company. I think that our president’s leadership style best fits to Bolman&Deal’s structural leadership framework. He tried to diagnose organization’s needs, to develop new model of the relationship among structure, strategy, and environment and focused on implementation and all of those are attributes of a structural leader.
However, I think that in developing new model of the relationship among structure and strategy, he did not make a good decision and it was the key decision which affected the progress of the whole simulation.
Regarding the number of team members, there was a disproportion between operational and non-operational teams and I think that this caused some problems. As we have discussed in the class, increasing the amount of discussion and increasing the size of the team really caused conflicts. With 9 members, operational team has lived some conflicts. It also enabled me to think about the “ideal team size”. I think that size of the operational team caused ineffectiveness and this affected whole FoodCorp organization and we challenged with time pressure. I think that other side effect of this decision was group thinking.
As I have mentioned above, in non-operational group meeting we discussed about the structure of the organization. However, I think that such an important decision which would affect all company should be made by all key managers not by a small group. But we challenged with a time pressure so could not discuss this decision with key managers at all and we just presented our results about new structure of the company.
Reflections about Service Group Meeting and My Performance: Our team size (4 team members) and attribution of our SVP enabled us to have qualified discussions in service group meeting. There was a broad range of information for each department and at the beginning it was really made me worried how would we prioritize all of those issues. At that point, I really...
