Subject Code: | MBA503 |
Subject Name: | Operations Management and Decision-Making Models |
Assessment Title: | Consultancy Webinar |
Assessment Type: Length: | Individual Video Recording 10 minutes (no more) |
Weighting: | 40% |
Total Marks: Submission: | 100 Online |
Your task
For this assessment, students produce a video in which they speak as if they are presenting to a company board. During this presentation, students will provide advice and reflections about the decision-making processes followed during a recent organisational crisis experienced by this company.
Assessment Description
This assessment involves students choosing a real-life example of an organisational crisis. This will be used as a case study. An organisational crisis is defined as a significant, essentially unexpected event which threatens the company’s reputation, financial standing and/or ability to operate. Examples of organisational crises include; natural disasters, security breaches, fraud, product recalls and environmental spills. The crisis students choose needs to be approved by their workshop facilitator. This assessment will allow you to demonstrate an application of strategies integrating ethical, social and global considerations, which benefit organisational performance. The assessment will further help you to exhibit analytical and evaluation skills about the real-world situation using a wide variety of decision-making approaches and techniques.
Assessment Instructions
In the video, students are to present as if they are presenting to the company board of their chosen organisation. Students are to imagine they are a consultant who has expertise if effective decision- making. They have been called in to review the decision-making processes followed during the crisis they have picked as a case study. The video should include a short overview of the crisis and then answer the following three questions:
A minimum of 5 academic references should be used to support the statements made and arguments presented in this video.
To ensure the success of your video presentation, you should take account of the following:
Please refer to the assessment marking guide to assist you in completing all the assessment criteria.
Operational management encourages decision-making approaches or models when the organization faces an inevitable crisis like fraud, breaches, or even product recalls. Decision-making models are incorporated into the organization to address the organizational issues (Lieder et al. 2018). For example, the rational decision-making model is implemented to address the issue with clear demarcations, and the people making the decisions are not biased while recognizing the problem. The selected organizational issue is product recall by General Motors in the year 2020.
Synopsis of the organization
Background to the issue
The Takata Airbags installed in the GM branded cars have led to people's injury and death in the US. The airbags are potentially explosive since they are made of ammonium nitrate, which tends to deteriorate with humidity, heat, and time. They tend to explode, and shrapnel is shot when the cars are under the crash's impact.
Decision-Making Model
The company undertakes the Practical Approach for decision-making. The practical decision-making approach combines the rational approach and the behavioral approach in creating more realistic decisions for the organizations (Alhawamdeh & Alsmairat, 2019).c The managers have identified the airbags' problems and the high voltage batteries installed in the cars. The company conducts voluntary safety check campaigns and informs the customers through email, messages, and personally calling them from the dealership agents. The practical approach in the decision-making process follows the framework of problems, interventions and concentrates on the areas that need an immediate solution.
Identifying decision-making errors influencing the decisions
The car manufacturer could not identify failure in isolation of the root cause of the faulty airbags installed in various cars' models. NHTSA has ordered a probe where the company rejected the argument in defending its stance of providing functional airbags (Acciarini et al. 2020). The public comments on the company's website have expressed anguish over the passengers' safety if the cars crashed under any circumstances. There have been incidents where the airbags have inflated and killed more than a dozen people with exploding shrapnel.
Decision-making bias
In General Motors' case, some information covered by news media on accidents did not have any influence on the management regarding the product recall. The company also neglected the cases filed against the installation of faulty airbags and fought the recall for the last four years. Here, the selective perception is on the other functional features of the cars manufactured by GM Motors, where they did not think it wise to recall the cars as they relied on the company's scientific and factual records (Zahera & Bansal, 2018). However, the data generated by NHTSA was finally accepted by the company, and they have started the process of recalling the cars.
Impact of the decision-making errors
The impact of wrong decisions taken by the company has a severe effect on the company's worldwide image. The passengers' safety is compromised with the faulty airbags where the customers lose their trust in the companies. The customers also feel that their hard-earned money is lost when they are not satisfied with the cars' essential features like protective airbags. The innovation and grievance addressing are also slow for the company, which tends to lose its business and overall revenue in this process.
Recommendation on the strategies with effectiveness in future
An analytical decision-making process is ideal to be adopted by the company when they have explicit goals to improve their image and concern for the customers' safety (Wayland, 2020). The decision-making process through an analytical approach is one of the versatile methods requiring experience to implement the organization's decisions.
Recommendation on the strategy