Agricultural firm characteristics and operations

Agricultural Firm

The goal of our final report is to develop a well-organized and relevant research on the causes that have led to an inefficient and ineffective organizational structure at Juicy Red Tomatoes and to design appropriate ways of action for the future management in the company. The methodology used includes questionnaires (with the employees and the upper management), observation within the company and relevant interviews with members of the company. The hypothesis is that Juicy Red Tomatoes has not benefited from the best management of its organizational structure and that the reward and payment system was at times inappropriate.

In order to address the first problem, direct observation is, in my opinion, the most important research tool. Indeed, in order to fundament the research, we need to look at the way decisions are made and implemented within the firm. Effectively, this is done by attending several management meetings and then tracking the projects downwards to the departments and the members of each department.

Not surprisingly, we have discovered that many of the projects were dealt with at the top levels of the company and that only sequentially they were passed down for processing. This revealed the fact that the management preferred to restrict information on projects and a low degree of delegation within the company. Further more, many of the employees justifiably felt that they were not involved in many of the company's relevant projects.

This conclusion was also based on direct interviews with the employees. There was a set of questions, with answer graded on a scale from 1 to 5, with 5 being the highest. Among these were issues like "how involved do you see yourself in the company's activity," "how often do you meet with the company's management" and "how clear do you find your direct boss's explanations?" A statistically large share of the people interviewed answered with 1 or 2 in many cases.

As a recommendation, I would suggest a ways to improve, first of all, the communication between the top management and the employees. This may include seminars once a week where the general directions are traced and a survey of the past week is presented. This is also an excellent moment for the employees to present any ideas or complaints they may have. Further more, intensive training where the role of decentralization and delegation would be explained should be organized for a reasonable period of time.

The second issue that was raised in our hypothesis referred to the selection and maintenance of the managerial personnel and the reward system. It was quite simple to determine whether there was an adequate scheme of reward in the company. The bonuses that the managers and employees had received were compared to the density of their activity in the respective period of time. It was thus discovered that there was no direct correlation between, for example, the number of important projects they had worked on or had delivered and the actual reward they had received. It was often the case that they had a larger reward for periods of inactivity.