COMPANY BACKGROUND

ArbreCorp Lte is a sawmill operation in Qubec, Canada. It operated independently

of the parent company and owned by a major forest products company. It has almost
30 years experience in the sawmill industry and has completely upgraded its
machinery 5 years ago. The company has divided the operation to six operating
departments: boom, sawmill, planer, packaging, shipping, and maintenance. In terms
of the management of the company, ArbreCorp has one general manager, 16
supervisors and support staff, and 180 unionized employees.
In general, ArbreCorp will routinely receives raw logs for cutting and planing into
building-grade lumber which is cut into two category which are 2-by-4 and 2-by-6
pieces of standard lengths. Higher grade logs from the sawmill department will be
sent as finished directly to the packaging department. However, the 40 percent of
sawmill output are cuts from lower grade logs which they require further work by the
planing department to become the finished goods.

Case Analysis

To analyze this case from the perspective of Organizational Behavior, we use the
team effectiveness model in solving the case. The model states organizational
and team environment as the first element to have an effective team and states
that:
Team members tend to work together more effectively when they receive
some

team-based

rewards,

when

the

organizations

leadership

is

supportive of team-oriented work structure, when the organizations

structure assigns teams distinctive clusters of work activity, when
information systems support team coordination, and when the physical
layout of the teams workspace encourages frequent communication.
(McShane, p. 194).
In this case, the packaging department are so segregated and isolated from the
rest of the organization and indirectly do not feel like part of the overall team.
Because of the isolated condition they receive inadequate supervision and
support from the team. The physical layout of packaging department was found

to be not conducive for regular interaction between departments and it has made
it challenging and difficult for other departments supervisors to frequently visit
them to provide direction and feedback on staffs` performance.

Secondly, using this model to relate in this case, it also suggect the team process
as one of the factor to create team effectiveness. The packaging department since
they are being isolated from other departments then, they were forming bad
team norms among the team. Because of no close monitoring by the supervisor,
new customs were formed whereby social loafing was the acceptable norm. Other
departments may be influenced to accept these norms if the norms were not
changed in early stage. Because abuse of time is tolerated in the packaging
department, employees are motivated to take longer breaks and leave early.
According to Mc Shane (2015), Leaders often have the capacity to alter existing
norms.

By speaking up or actively coaching the team, they can often subdue

dysfunctional norms while developing useful norms. Lack of supervision in the

department has caused the employees to exhibit this behaviour freely.

In addition, the team design of the packaging department also one of the factor
that cause the bottleneck in the packaging department. Since the other
department increased the productivity, packaging departments should rearrange
the task in the team properly to finish packaging the increased finshed goods.
The team does not have issue of inadequate of employees since it has mentioned
there were temporary employees in the team to support the increased
productivity. The company exhibits team design of Sequential Interdependence
where the increased productivity in other departments will affect other
department significantly.

The ineffectiveness of the packaging department in

designing the team based on size and task cordination has caused the packaging
quality of ArbreCorp to drop significantly. In addition, team design of the
packaging department should assign effective internal controls in the packaging
department to protect and maintain this competitive advantage of ArbreCorp.