Chattanooga Ice Cream Division Case Solution And Analysis, HBR Case Study Solution & Analysis of Harvard Case Studies

Chattanooga Ice Cream Division

Problem Diagnosis

Charles Moore leads the Chattanooga Ice Cream Division and he was promoted to one of the top members of the senior management team in the year 1993. The leadership style of Charles Moore is different from his predecessors and now he is the general manager and the president of the division. The clash of the leadership style has contributed significantly to the dysfunction of the entire team which is being led by him.

This occurred when he had informed his team that one of the third largest customers of the company decided to use a different product which belongs to one of its competitors. Along with this, all the senior team members of the Moore’s division were interested in making their own departments more successful and they did not emphasize much on the success of the company.

This fragmentation within the divisions has caused challenges with communication and trust, dysfunction and also the ineffectiveness of the leadership style of the predecessors of Moore usually relied on the input, which was provided by anyone within the organization. Now an emergency meeting has called up by the senior manager with the senior executive team which according to him is a big failure for the Chattanooga Ice Cream Division. The one and the only reason for this was that the department members were reluctant to raise their opinion outside the boundaries of their functional domains (Sloane, 2003).

Team Dysfunction

The team of the Chattanooga Ice Cream Division was dysfunctional and there were many reasons for this. The previous leader had used an autocratic style of leadership and did not rely on the input provided from others when making the important decisions for the division. Furthermore, the executives did not know what a pure concept of a team is as they were never trained as a team.

Due to this, the current general manager, Charles Moore, had faced a lot of difficulty in gaining their useful insights on the decisions that were group based. The team members always questioned the trustworthiness and the capabilities of one another. They were only worried for the issues related to their own departments and they were very much defensive for the organizational issues facing them.

There was a lack of cohesiveness and vulnerability-based trust within the team which had resulted in agendas being created for personal use against one another and distrust started to become a norm within the team. There was lack of engagement and trust factor was absent within the team and they started to question one another when they were requested to provide an input on a specific issue (Sloane, 2003).

Moore had taken an approach to resolve the lack of trust issues within the team members which according to Moore was based upon avoidance of the issue rather than finding a specific solution to an issue. Whenever conflicts arose between the team members, Charles had to reschedule or take breaks during the meetings and he did not took any significant step to resolve the conflict among the team members.

This is basically low in cooperation and low in assertiveness approach with dealing a conflict (Thomas and Kilman, 2007). There was a false sense of harmony created by Moore when he was not able to explore the concerns of the team members or his own concerns and was unable to embrace conflict (Lencioni, 2012). All of these issues have led to entire organization in the face of lack of communication, vision, transparency, accountability and the resiliency of the organization. ...............

This is just a sample partial case solution. Please place the order on the website to order your own originally done case solution.