Tamarack Industries Summary

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Motorboat manufacture Tamarack Industries has a summer student hire program. The program is designed to backfill the permanent employees while they take vacation time, primarily during the summer months. The majority of Tamarack Industries permanent employees do not care for the summer hire program due to the students’ lack of skills and unprofessional behavior. Supervisor Dan Jensen decided this summer he would try a different strategy and put all the summer hires on one team. Mark Allen the most experienced employee leads the charge with enthusiasm. Mark’s training techniques related to the younger, technological savvy students, and soon their production rate matched the experience employees. What started out as friendly competition …show more content…

Dan Jensen had enough of the rivalry between the two groups and decided to shuffle the summer hires and permanent employees together. Mark did not feel that was the appropriate action, he feared the students would quit. There are six main conditions that cause conflict in organizational settings: incompatible goals, differentiation, interdependence, scarce resources, ambiguous rules, and communication problems (McShane & Von Glinow, 2014). Tamarack Industries shows a few signs of structural conflicts, the biggest source is differentiation. According to McShane & Von Glinow (2014), “Differentiation differs from goal incompatibility; two people or departments may agree on a common goal but have different beliefs about how to achieve that goal” (pg. 317). The older employees did not care for the students’ antics. When they finished their production for the day, they would goof off and be condescending towards the other group of employees. Interdependence conflict was prevalent as well; this type of interdependence increased as resources were sabotaged and work production was affected. “Resource scarcity generates conflict because each person or unit requiring the same resource necessarily undermines others who also need that

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