Leading Change
Good Sport is a fitness equipment manufacturing company in Coral Springs, Florida that has experienced success in their first 15 years of business. The company has started to expand into Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. The company was founded by Jason Poole, a former basketball player who has become an icon for physical fitness and wellness. Poole’s popularity and successful marketing of products has been the key to success in Good Sport. The company is introducing a new product and the leader needs to adjust to the culture in order to get the departments to believe that this product can be successful in the organization. Power structures and politics and their role on the new strategic plan will be examined. As a company makes changes, some resistance to this change will occur. This paper will examine strategies Good Sport can use to overcome this resistance brought forward by the members of the organization. The leadership style and the affect of the style of the organization will also be examined. Good Sport needs a leadership style that will be effective in implementing the new strategic plan and culture.
Good Sport Organizational Structure and Culture
Organizational Structure is “the division of labor and the patterns of coordination, communication, work flow, and formal power that direct organizational activities” (McShane & Von Glisow, 2004, p. 446). Good Sport’s organizational structure is a hierarchal based. The construction consists of the executive, the middle, and the junior management teams. As a middle manager, the task of the user was introducing a new product to the production and sales departments. The appropriate strategies had to be used to introduce the product to each of the departments. In this simulation the division of labor lied between the production and sales department. The product needed to be communicated to both departments allowing each to see how the new products will affect the departments. The...