It is to be 16pages (4,500 words) Times New Roman 12pt font, double-spaced. The topic is FAA – Insuring safe air travel when regulators sympathize with airlines first. Focusing on the Boeing 737 MAX.
Module One: Introduction and Case Highlights
This module should convey a brief description of the case and why it is worth studying in order to learn more about (pick one or more –>) erroneous policies, management failure, poor leadership, risky technology and so on. However you describe this, the reader response you are looking for is: “Yes, that can sink an operation, let me read on to find out more.” This module is like a movie trailer describing broadly the crisis that confronted your organization and how things turned out (which means this module is best done last).
Module Two: Organizational Functions, Structures (O 1.2) and Decision Processes (O 3.2)
Describe your “case organization(s**)” carefully. Describe the primary business, product or service. Provide an approximate employee count. Describe the geographic dispersion of the organization (e.g., operated from one central location, from a number of semi-autonomous locations or from many locations under headquarters direction). Provide a snapshot of financial indicators in a year prior to the organization’s crisis: annual budget for public and non-profit organizations, revenues, profits or losses for corporate entities. Considering these data, estimate the size of the organization relative to its peers.
Describe the structures used to set policy and guide your organization. Corporations employ boards of directors for independent, responsible policy direction, but the composition of the board makes a difference. CEOs who also serve as Chair of the Board may push through policies that give the CEO near-total autonomy. A board populated with CEO referrals may be a rubber stamp. Representatives of creditors and investors who become board members may seek to dismember the firm to benefit their patrons.
If the organization(s) in your case was a partnership, non-profit or privately held company, describe those arrangements, making sure to include the structures in place, if any, that set organizational objectives and strategies for achieving them.
If your agency was public, identify the outside entities ultimately responsible for the policy direction of the agency: Mayor or governor? County commission? State legislature? City Council? Describe the relationship between these entities and the leadership of the agency.
Include the organization’s mission statement. From that mission statement as well as other organizational pronouncements, Identify key values expected to guide all employees in the performance of their duties (e.g., NYPD’s “Courtesy, Professionalism, Respect”).
(**NOTE: For topics involving several organizations delivering similar services, identify shared administrative characteristics, e.g., medical professionals share the management of hospitals with administrators; reimbursements from private and public insurers are the major revenue source; physicians for the most part police themselves; professional codes provide the values doctors and nurses subscribe to.)
Module Three: Your Organization(s) as Human and Natural Systems (O 1.2)
Basic organizational factors will set the tone of the relationship between superiors and subordinates. (For instance, the paramilitary structure of most law enforcement agencies mandates that lower ranking officers obey lawful commands of superiors, which tends to produce rigid hierarchies. Major universities like CUNY are highly decentralized, where colleges, schools, academic departments, programs and research projects operate with substantial autonomy. Businesses will drive performance by basing rewards and penalties on results produced by individuals and work groups. Exceptions occur—some police departments eschew rigid hierarchies, authoritarians rule some colleges, some businesses nurture employees.) Describe these working relationships in your case study organization, explaining the key factors shaping how employees related to each other.
Next describe how these working relationships affected how policies were, or were not, carried out. Describe the extent employees bought into the organizations goals. Describe the general attitude of employees towards the management regime. Assess the awareness of executives regarding the degree of employee alienation from the organization or its leadership. Describe any steps management took to pursue goals and establish policies to which employees could more willingly subscribe. Describe the rank and file culture of your organization, paying close attention to its impact on issues central to the organization’s crisis. (O’Hara/Sainato, Chapter 6 addresses the role of culture in organizational failure.)
Module Four: Perverse impacts of organization structures & processes (O 1.3)
Identify how routines of your organization(s) helped pave the way for the crisis. Describe any “normal accidents” (O’Hara/Sainato, Chapter 3), structural failures (O’ Hara/Sainato, Chapter 4), or collapses of key processes. Whatever routines you identify, explain how they had been taken for granted, overlooked, ignored or otherwise minimized until moving front and center in the organization’s crisis.
Module Five: Quality Control and Oversight (O 6.2)
Identify the oversight entities (internal, such as auditing or risk management, or external, such as Inspectors General or the Department of Justice) implicated in your case. Describe how these units performed before, during and after the organization’s crisis. Pay particular attention ineffective or absent internal oversight prior to the crisis, as well as external oversight brought to bear in the wake of the crisis. Read any reports produced by oversight bodies relative to your organization’s crisis, citing these works in writing your paper.
Module Six: The Environment of the Organization (O 3.2)
Describe how your organization was nested in its environment. Depending on the particular organization, the environment includes: related or competitor organizations, clientele or customers, organized labor, economic or budgetary conditions and the political setting. Describe the role of played by specific environmental factors in precipitating the organization’s crisis. Explain how specific factors proved critical, for better or worse, as the organization coped with its crisis. Consider the extent to which “institutionalization” (O’Hara/Sainato, Chapter 7) affected the organization’s recognition, response and takeaways from the crisis.
Module Seven: The Legal Bottom Line (Make an early priority in your research) (O 7.2)
Detail the legal actions—criminal, civil or administrative—that arose from organization’s crisis. Research this module early on, since criminal/civil processes and administrative investigations almost always produce substantial, reliable documentation about what went wrong. Bring the legal saga right up to the present, since even defunct organizations can remain “zombie” parties to litigation where their remains are picked over by creditors. Be sure to describe in this section any “resource diversions” (O’Hara/Sainato, Chapter 7), such as thefts, embezzlement or systems abuses before or during your organization’s crisis.
Module Eight: Current State of Affairs—Organizational Passages and Reforms
What is the current state of the organization (or set of organizations) that you studied? If your organization is defunct or has been absorbed by other organizations, describe that passage, noting any beneficiaries or victims. If the organization turned around, detail how and describe the role played by new leadership. If the crisis led to the enactment of legislation designed to prevent a recurrence, describe what was done. If evidence seems to show that the organization is little changed, cite that evidence in explaining why.
