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The case is suitable for strategy or entrepreneurship modules. It is designed to teach students about the importance of implementing formal processes when entering a growth phase as well as the complexities, unexpected costs, and benefits that growing a business can bring.

The case is aimed at MBA or Master-level students or executive education programmes as part of a strategy or entrepreneurship module.

Lattice Towers is a South African company in the telecommunications infrastructure sector. They are struggling to generate sufficient cash flow to sustain operations as a result of poor strategic decision-making regarding tower-build site acquisition. To compound matters, the owner has been struggling with health issues related to the stress caused by the crises that Lattice Towers is going through. Recently, however, a multinational publicly listed behemoth in the telecommunications industry, Helios Towers, offered to acquire the company. The acquisition offer seems like a saving grace to the owner; however, Lattice Towers is deeply personal to the him and he would not like to lose the brand. Furthermore, there is a tremendous opportunity for business growth due to the imminent increase in demand for tower infrastructure. But based on the challenging financial position the business currently finds itself in, he might not have the option to keep the business.

To develop a decision-making framework and strategy to navigate the business life-cycle stages, from survival to growth

Understand the concepts of uncertainty, risk, and liquidity premiums that apply to entrepreneurship

Understand the stress-related implications for entrepreneurs

Understand the psychological costs and benefits of entrepreneurship

Understand the personal financial implications for entrepreneurship

This case provides detailed information about digital technologies and business practices that may help offline retailers catch up with the trend of new retail. After studying the case and working on the assignment questions, students will be able to:▪ Understand new features of smart cash registers, including facial-recognition payment, purchase-sales-inventory management, customer profile and store management, which all are important for the long-term development of the retail business in the age of “new retail”.▪ Identify opportunities, practices and impacts of digital technologies, such as big data and artificial intelligence, on contemporary retail businesses.▪ Identify problems of traditional retail and suggest solutions by applying the concepts and tools learned above.▪ Apply digital marketing approaches and tools (e.g., social media, livestreaming and online word-of-mouth) to design marketing campaigns; students should include basic elements such as the 6Ms for effective marketing communications (market, mission, message, media, money and measure).

This case describes difficult situations facing Leo Shoudong Pan, the founder and CEO of Yun Dong Jia Technologies Co Ltd (YDJ), in marketing communications. With a motto of “Making it easy to open stores anywhere”, YDJ develops and sells smart cash registers, which provide a self-developed operating system and cloud computing services. Pan targets small and micro retailers, who are technology laggards when digital transitions had swept the world. His goal is to build a network of 100,000 pieces of smart cash registers across China, but he has only sold 8,000 pieces since he founded YDJ in 2016. He must make a breakthrough in the business. To drive leads and sales, he feels the urgency of conducting effective marketing communications with target customers and enhance their understanding on the value that YDJ creates for them. Monetary incentives are tangible but not yet fully demonstrated YDJ’s value. With the traditional retail approach, brick-and-mortar stores, especially those small-scaled ones, are not able to meet the market change; instead, they must adopt digital techniques to catch up with the trend of new retail, which is necessary for a long-term business development rather than just a temporary measure during the Covid-19 pandemic. Pan must craft more compelling messages. What customer value should be chosen as incentives to motivate the target market? How to conduct effective marketing communications correspondingly?

Senior undergraduate; Postgraduate; MBA; EMBA.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 8: Marketing.

The learning outcomes are as follows: identifying and prioritising of stakeholders’ needs during crises; gaining insight into applying contextual intelligence in leaders’ decision-making on philanthropic investments; and evaluating initiatives by differentiating between creating shared value and corporate social responsibility.

On 15 March 2020, Bruno Olierhoek, Chairman and MD, Nestlé East and Southern Africa considers his dilemma of where to focus his community support initiatives during COVID-19, which could reflect their company’s purpose of enhancing quality of life and contributing to a healthier future in their response to the crisis? Also, creating shared value (CSV) was in their DNA as a company, and they wanted to do more than philanthropic gestures; therefore, they had to decide carefully about leveraging their strategic partnerships in the relief effort. The case highlights existing community involvement projects, pre-COVID-19, which illustrate multi-stakeholder collaboration. These existing trust relationships and partnerships are then leveraged during the COVID-19 pandemic. The case highlights unintended consequences of Nestlé’s gesture of donating food products to the 5,000 frontline health-care workers for specific stakeholder groups, such as the positive emotional responses of Nestlé’s own employees. These events in the case relate to existing theoretical frameworks, such as corporate citizenship which elicits pro-organisational behaviour in stakeholder groups.

Postgraduate programmes MBA or MPhil.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only.

CSS: 7 Management Science

The learning objectives to be drawn from the case are as follows: to explore the violation of the psychological contract; to understand the notion of the boundaryless career; to assess the advantages and disadvantages of leaving an employer; to explore the factors to be considered when contemplating a career move; and to identify career management strategies in the digital age.

Management practices at Media Inc. have resulted in a growing sense of dissatisfaction for Palesa Khume who had been hired to head up the management team of a new glossy women’s magazine, Mirror Me. This project was exciting and exhilarating for Khume. The shifting of agreed-upon objectives causes increased stress to Media Inc. employees and comes to a head with the reneging of the agreed-upon year-end bonus to Khume. She is now faced with the decision whether she should stay or leave the organisation.

Postgraduate Business students, especially MBA students.

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 6: Human Resource Management

The purpose of this paper is to help readers better understand the psychological impact of employees feeling underutilized in the workplace.

The case is based on primary data collected from Jonathan and describes his actual experience in the workplace. Mark also provided input on the situation. Because Jonathan and Mark are still employed in the same institution, the names have been disguised to protect their identity.

Jonathan is a highly motivated and successful employee who was promoted into a position that had no real responsibility. His manager would not restructure the job to make it more challenging or rewarding, so after three years of frustration, Jonathan has to decide if he should keep trying to fix the job, coast until retirement or resign.

This case is applicable for undergraduate business courses in organizational behavior, principles of management, principles of human resource management or leadership.

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 primarily revolves around the establishment, alignment and maintenance of expectations within a work environment. Specifically, the case focuses on the challenges that were created by the expectations that Kofi Nyarkoh had of his employee, Kwame Owusu, and the expectations that Kwame in turn formed based on the process surrounding his employment relationship with Kofi. The case is intended to help students assess a business situation and define the perceptions and expectations of stakeholders; assess the impact of differences in perceptions and expectations on the attitudes, behaviors and motivation in the workplace and develop appropriate recommendations.

The case was written based on a combination of field and telephone interviews and other communication between one of the authors and Kofi.

The case presents the story of Rococo LLC's founder and one of his key employees. Both men were originally from Ghana. They met in the USA through a mutual friend, and Kofi hired him to work on a client site for Rococo LLC despite Kwame's insufficient work experience.

This case is intended for students of organizational behavior, human resource management and management both at advanced undergraduate and graduate levels.

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.

The learning outcomes of this case study are to understand the business-to-business (B2B) consumer outlook on mental health care in emerging markets; analyse the challenges faced in creating a need for mental health care in Indian workplaces; explore the business attractiveness of the B2B model and understand the business potential of the B2B segment at heyy,; and contemplate different innovative strategies that could change consumer mindset on mental health care in emerging markets.

Ankit, the founder and CEO of heyy, was facing a conundrum. “heyy,” was built on normalizing mental well-being at workplaces. His mental health-care app heyy, had crossed 50,000 subscribers within a few months of launch. The mobile app was designed to spread mental health awareness and provide various levels of mental well-being interventions. Business-to-consumer and B2B customer segmentation had been targeted by this start-up. The B2B space consisted of employees working with partner organizations. The adoption rates of employees using the features of heyy, declined after the initial app download. The employees had yet to fully become acclimatized to the features of heyy,. Exploring the business potential and investigating the business attractiveness of the B2B segment were the focus of the present study. Ankit contemplated various strategies he could adopt to increase user adoption of “heyy,” services by employees in his partner organizations. The case study strives to address the question – “What are the risks faced by organizations when entering the mental health-care industry in emerging markets like India, where mental health care is still not openly discussed?”

This case study is designed to be taught as part of the “entrepreneurship development” and “strategic management” courses for undergraduates, postgraduates and students of executive programmes in management. Students need to be aware of basic strategic management concepts such as BCG matrix, SWOT analysis and business canvas before working on this case study, so they could dissect the case from multiple perspectives to get a comprehensive outlook on the case.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 11: Strategy.

Kevin McRider, the COO of a fledging research facility, needed to foster an environment where scientists explored the boundaries of the metals, chemicals, polymers and tools used to create innovating medical devices. The freshly-minted PhDs he hired were enthusiastic to design and conduct research projects that bridged their scientific disciplines, in a collaborative workplace, with time allocated to individual projects as well. Effectively managed, their research would help the parent corporation leapfrog over existing or near-future technology.

The problem for McRider was how to get Lintell to realize his vision of a collaborative organizational culture that promoted revolutionary scientific discoveries. His challenges included managerial behaviors that prohibited critical interaction and information sharing, as well as disruptive organizational dynamics he himself had set in motion including pressures to focus only on certain research goals and projects at the expense of creative exploration, and the violation of the psychological contracts McRider himself had created with the scientists during recruitment.