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Leadership.

The case is suitable for MBA, Executive level courses.

Yongye Group is a biotechnological enterprise in Inner Mongolia, China. In China, people lack trust in economic transactions due to the transitional state of the economy, especially regarding food safety. To respond to this situation, Wu Zishen, the chairman of the Board of Directors of Yongye Group, was determined to build trust among employees, distributors, farmers, and consumers towards the company. To this end, he started using a creative incentive system with employees and stakeholders: the pay-before-performance incentive system. According to this system, the reward is delivered in advance, contrary to be paid after the fulfillment of the task. This practice is meant to transform employees' work attitude from a passive “being told to work” to a more proactive “I want to work” mentality. When such an incentive system is practiced with customers and external distributors, it sends a message that the company is “treating customers as company employees”, which means that they are trusted as if they were part of the company itself. Wu Zishen also introduced a coherent series of leadership practices that generate a truly proactive culture in the organization.

From this case, students will learn how to create a proactive culture in business organizations and the effect of pay-before-performance on employees' work motivation.

Teaching notes and an exercise for class-based discussion are available.

By July 2015, 20% of Starbucks’s payments in the United States came through its mobile app. The company had created a tool to both drive loyalty and grow its customer base. No stranger to innovation, Starbucks was partnering with iTunes as early as 2007, earned its first mobile marketer of the year award by 2010, introduced its mobile app in 2011, and by 2015, 94% of Facebook users were either fans of Starbucks or friends with someone who was. This case explores the company’s commitment to mobile and its social media prowess, and considers just what it takes to drive loyalty in a customer base.

Cardagin, a new start-up in the increasingly competitive space of consumer/merchant apps for smartphones, is reaching an inflection point: decisions it makes at this stage can determine whether it becomes a national presence or an also-ran. The CEO needs to demonstrate the value of Cardagin's service to retailers and consumers in compelling ways. The case provides students an opportunity to analyze a new digital venture, explore expansion options, and evaluate the challenges in working with many small businesses, each with its own idiosyncrasies.

After studying this case, the students should be able to: explain the importance of employee engagement; illustrate the role of the participatory management style in an organizational context; discuss why managers may use engagement practices to operate effectively in businesses to lead change and innovation; identify the critical success factors, barriers and outcomes of employee involvement in driving high performance; and discuss the dilemma faced by the managers in the emerging economies while driving the momentum of excellence in the long run.

This is a real case about a leading health-care service company located in the Middle East. The health-care organization’s name is changed to NOVA for reasons of confidentiality. The NOVA is an independent, public joint stock company created to meet the curative needs of the public health-care system in Middle East. The company introduced the Employee Suggestion Scheme named Minara in 2011 in a Federal Government decree, introducing innovation as a major pillar of management in 2013 with intent to encourage organizations build innovative solutions and pioneer initiatives and apply it effectively in services, processes and programmes. Making the Minara programme work in line with the national health agenda, Ms. Fatima who headed the Excellence and Innovation Department took the initiative of accelerating the innovative Programme (Minara). The case data were collected based on both primary and secondary sources. Although the case is based on the real data, it has been ammonised. The case describes the transformation of the innovation process at NOVA through the employee engagement programme (Minara) in meeting the disruptive challenges. This case addresses the challenges faced by the Excellence and Innovation manager who used effective employee engagement practices through the Employee Suggestion Programme in a creative way to bring about innovation in the health-care sector. The case outlines the dilemma faced by the Excellence and Innovation manager in bringing about innovation through the Employee involvement programme in the emerging economic scenario. The case will focus on the analysis of the different aspects of the issues pertaining to employee engagement, employee motivation and the framing of empowerment strategies to bring about innovation and continuous improvement through an effective employee suggestion programme. The case is intended to give budding managers an insight into innovation and employee engagement practices that impact performance in the organization.

This case will be suitable to be used in Human Resource Management and Management of Change and Innovation course at undergraduate and Master’s level.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.

CSS 1: Accounting and Finance

Human resources (compensation, total rewards, employee engagement, training and development), strategy.

Undergraduate HRM majors and postgraduate business and management.

This case highlights the strong growth and expansion of a former small to medium-sized enterprise (SME) in the United Arab Emirates, Tips & Toes. The company is a leader in the beauty and fitness service industry, and much of its growth and success is attributable to the leadership of its general manager and her implementation of a differentiation strategy, a market innovator in concepts, products and services, and a total rewards system for engaging and retaining employees. Tips & Toes is planning for continued, aggressive growth and expansion over the next five years. This case also highlights an underrepresented area of focus for case studies: women-led businesses, SMEs, and entrepreneurship and innovation.

The main focus of this case is for students to examine the beneftts of using a total rewards strategy to engage and retain employees, and more importantly to see the links between such a strategy and business and revenue growth. This is particularly a salient learning point for students in emerging markets, where more traditional types of compensation and views of the employment contract tend to prevail. In addition, this case could be used as a supplementary learning experience regarding strategy and strategic focus of an organization (i.e. the Treacy and Wiersema model of product leadership, customer intimacy, or operational excellence as a strategic discipline for a firm). And finally, this case provides an example of a woman-led organization which grew out of SME status into a market leader; this example provides students with insight into workable entrepreneur opportunities to which they might not see a direct linkage when reading case studies of large multinational organizations or conglomerates.

Teaching notes are available; please consult your librarian for access.

The case describes the internal growth workshop initiative at Vedanta Group. Anil Agarwal in 1976 founded Vedanta as a scrap-metal dealership in Mumbai (then Bombay). Over the years, Anil pursued a very aggressive growth journey with a vision to create a leading global natural resource company. The principal objective of discussing this case is to understand how Vedanta introduced this initiative and how it fits within the strategic human resource management at the group.

The reading and discussion on case will enable participants to appreciate importance of reward management in performance management system for both employee and organizational good; to develop insight on the effect of perceived discrimination on the motivation of employees; to internalize the effect of perceived unjust, subjective, non-communicative, non-transparent policies on the behavior and productivity of employees and overall organizational culture and climate; and to comprehend the importance of HR and OB issues with respect to performance management system for the benefit of employee morale, motivation and organizational culture.

The effectiveness of an employee is the key factor for the employer. All the profit that the company or the organization makes depends on the employees’ productiveness. The case needs to be understood in the overall context of performance management system (Ferreiraa and Otley, 2009) with focus on elements of appraisal and compensation via rewards and recognition as per objective standards. Performance management systems (PMSs) is a more general descriptor if the intention is to capture a holistic picture of the management and control of organizational performance. Performance management policies and practices refer to the processes of setting, communicating and monitoring performance targets and rewarding results with the aim of enhancing organizational effectiveness (Fee, McGrath-Champ and Yang, 2011). PMS includes both the formal mechanisms, processes, systems and networks used by organizations, and also the more subtle, yet important, informal controls that are used (Chenhall, 2003; Malmi and Brown, 2008). Otley (1999) proposed a framework which highlights five central issues which need to be considered as part of the process of developing a coherent structure for performance management systems. The five areas addressed by this framework include identification of the key organizational objectives and the processes and methods involved in assessing the level of achievement under each of these objectives, formulating and implementing strategies and plans, as well as the performance measurement and evaluation processes, process of setting performance targets and the levels at which such targets are set, rewards systems used by organizations and the implications of achieving or failing to achieve performance targets and types of information flows required to provide adequate monitoring of performance. While the case touches upon all the aspects of the PMS framework, it revolves round the reward episode and elaborates on the way it affects all stakeholders, those who got the benefit, those who felt discriminated and those were mere observers to the episode. Objective performance appraisals are needed to ensure that every employee produces the best performance and that the work performed is rewarded with reasonable increases in pay scales or special additional allowances or incentives. This system carries crucial importance as it helps managers to decide which rewards should be handed out, by what amount and to whom. Additionally, performance appraisals may increase an employee’s commitment and satisfaction (Wiese and Buckley, 1998) The case readers need to notice that when organizations fail to follow objective appraisal or reward standards, the same rewards become a cause of contention. The reward which was handed over to the employees in this case was in addition to the annual appraisal. Though the role of rewards has been well-recognized in motivating the employees to continue performing at high level and encourage others to strive for better performance, what needs to be recognized that rewards’ per say does not serve purpose. They need to be dealt within the context of performance management system. Using rewards to favor or discriminate a few employees by using subjective standards backfires and does no good as the person who is favored cannot take pride in it and is not motivated to perform better or equally well as he/she also knows that the work has no relation to the reward, it is personal favor, on the other hand, the one who is discriminated feel discouraged and demotivated to perform. Rewards have the potential to both help and harm the organization if dealt in a callous and careless manner. Use of rewards to favor or discriminate certain people due to subjective preference can be suicidal for the organization and irreparably damage the trust of the employees in the management. It has been well stated that fairness and objectivity are the core principles using an assessment of the nature and size of the job each is employed to carry out (Torrington et al., 2005). If any organization decides to include rewards as a motivating mechanism, it needs to cull out unambiguous and transparent criteria for rewarding. If employees perceive procedural or distributive injustice from the management, it is not only detrimental for the employee’ relations and teamwork, it also tarnishes the reputation of the organization and jeopardizes the culture of the organization. Reward management needs to be closely related to performance appraisals, job evaluations and overall performance management systems. The current case elaborates on one such instance where unjustified inequity in reward system not only disturbed the employees concerned but it had bred a negative image of the organization among other employees too, organizational citizenship was replaced with contempt and feeling of apathy.

Post graduate students and working professionals can benefit from this study.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.

Human resource management.

The case describes how a leader simultaneously addresses various aspects of business and people management to achieve a turnaround. The actions taken by the leader to get rid of the non-functional practices, nurture the existing practices, and create new strategies and processes to accomplish business growth are described. The leader reshapes the organisational culture in partnership with the human resource department. The case can be used to show the different leadership styles (transactional and transformational) and tactics for managing change-partnering with HR to revamp people practices, cherry-pick and develop the right talent, etc.

The case, “Shivani Carriers Pvt. Ltd.: Managing Employee Motivation at the Bottom of the Pyramid”, has been designed to teach students about the basic principles of employee motivation. The case is also a representative example of the problems faced by small and medium-sized businesses in employee acquisition, motivation, and retention, especially at junior levels i.e. entry-level operational and front-line roles. The case documents the history and evolution of the driver management system (DMS) instituted by Vandana and Hemant Laddha at Shivani Carriers Pvt. Ltd. (SCPL). It looks at the constraints faced by the company and the challenges that emerged during the implementation of the new system. After initial success, Vandana Laddha faced a dilemma around the future direction of the DMS. The original incentive scheme had been a success: driver productivity and motivation had improved significantly. Given that the scheme had achieved its desired objectives, the firm had decided to modify it to further improve efficiency. However, employee discontent was brewing since the scheme had been modified. Vandana Laddha had to decide if she should she bring back the original incentive management scheme to quell employee discontent or should she introduce alternate initiatives to manage driver motivation? If she chose to introduce new initiatives, what could these be? What mechanisms would she need to put in place to support the new initiatives? What about the complaints of the drivers? What should she do to address the complaints of the drivers? The case provides students with an opportunity to understand the principles of employee motivation with the help of extant and contemporary research on motivation. It also sheds light on the link between initiatives aimed at increasing motivation and other managerial activities and mechanisms. Importantly, it helps students arrive at an integrated framework that links various aspects of employee motivation such as needs, cognitions, work design factors, organizational support and actions, organizational culture and industry context.

This case has multiple theoretical linkages at the micro-organizational behavior level (e.g. job enrichment), but it is best analyzed and understood when examined at the organizational level. Students will learn about shared entrepreneurship, high performance work systems, shared leadership and virtuous organizations, and how they can develop a sustainable competitive advantage.

The case was prepared using a qualitative approach. Data were collected via the following ways: literature search; organizational documents and published historical accounts; direct observations by a research team; and on-site audio recorded and transcribed individual and group interviews conducted by a research team (the authors) with organization members at multiple levels of the firm.

John Lewis Company has been in business since 1864. In 1929, it became the John Lewis Partnership (JLP) when the son of the founder sold a portion of the firm to the employees. In 1955, he sold his remaining interest to the employee/partners. JLP has a constitution and has a representative democracy governance structure. As the firm approaches the 100th anniversary of the trust, it is faced with multiple challenges. The partners are faced with the question – How to respond to the environmental turmoil?

This case has environmental issues – How to respond to competition, technological changes and environmental uncertainty and an internal issue – How can high performance work practices provide a sustainable competitive advantage? Both issues can be examined in strategic management courses after the students have studied traditionally managed companies. This case could also be used in human resource management courses.