Treadway Case Study Solution

About the Lima Tire Plant

Located in Lima, Ohio, the plant building encompassed over 1.5 million square feet and was situated on 128 acres of land. About 1,120 people were employed at the Lima location: 970 were hourly employees and 150 were salaried employees. The hourly personnel at the plant were unionized by the United Steelworkers (USW), which had merged with the United Rubber Workers in 1995.
The Lima Plant had undergone a $100 million expansion and modernization effort in 2000, which enabled the plant to increase capacity and utilize new manufacturing technology. Due to the updated equipment and technology spending, Lima had become one of Treadway’s top plants for productivity and quality ratings.
The plant now operated 24 hours
Treadway’s tire plant was facing a critical problem of high turnover & job dissatisfaction among its line-foremen. About 23 out of 50 foremen turned over in 2007, with about half of those leaving their positions voluntarily and rest are being told to leave after they didn’t match high productivity requirements.
The problems faced by foremen’s are related with managing hourly basis lower level employees and the role these people play in production process. They expressed concerns about lack of authority and adversarial relations with the hourly workers. They felt they are between a rock and a hard place w.r.t management & union and has to take care of needs and interests of both.
The line foreman lack the proper training needed to excel and they have a horrible relationship with their direct superior. There are two reasons why many line foreman ended up leaving the
Foremen turnover- this is the process in which new foremen are to be hired by the organization because the old ones have left the organization.
Moral issues – since there was no coordination between management and foremen, the trust of foremen in the organization was going low. This lead to job dissatisfaction among the foremen.
Sense of ignorance- they used to feel undervalued and their contribution was ignored in the organization this lead to low performance of work
Lack of productivity – job dissatisfaction resulted in less productivity
Bad relations – relationship between foremen and the union was threatened

Q3: The elements of work system that contributed to the problem were as follows?
Lack of Training- There was no training provided to the foremen, they were expected to do the work on their own. Training provides knowledge about the work and improves efficiency.
Communication- There is no proper communication between the levels of management. Communication between the foremen and union and between the managers and foremen was not proper. Which lead to lack of coordination between the levels of the