GM500 Unit 6 Snowplow Routes Seminar Reflection Example

Crews Who Drove the Old Routes: A Unit 6 Seminar Reflection on Four Explanations for One Refusal

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

GM500: Management Theories and Practices I

Unit 6 Seminar Reflection

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The public works department, its crews and the classmates are composite; the theorists and sources cited are real.

The Case

A mid-sized city bought route optimization software for its snowplow fleet. The software redesigned all 22 routes and cut total plowing miles by about 12 percent. The routes were issued in November. During the first two storms, GPS records showed that most crews drove their old routes, and several drove a hybrid. The superintendent asked the seminar a direct question: should she discipline the crews?

My Starting View

I came in with Taylor. He described workers deliberately holding back effort, which he called soldiering, and argued that management should design the one best method and insist on it (Taylor, 1911). The software had found a better method. The crews had refused it. My notes said: "Clear instruction, clear refusal. This is a supervision problem." I expected to argue for a short period of firm enforcement, then evaluation.

Mayo's Reading

A classmate who runs a utility line crew pushed back first. She read the refusal as a group norm defending itself. Crews had driven the same routes for years and had built an informal order around them: who plowed the hospital entrance first, who covered for whom near the end of a shift. New routes broke that order overnight. Mayo's account of the informal group, which sets its own standards and resists changes imposed from outside, fit her reading (Mayo, 1933). I accepted that this explained why the crews were reluctant, but I still thought it did not justify ignoring an order.

Barnard's Question

The instructor then asked whether the order had ever fallen inside what Chester Barnard called the zone of indifference. Barnard argued that authority depends on acceptance: an order is followed without question only when the person receiving it sees it as consistent with the organization's purpose and within what they can reasonably do (Barnard, 1938). The instructor asked us what the crews knew that the software did not.

The crews were not refusing a better method; they were refusing a method that did not know what they knew, and the order fell outside the zone where they would accept it without question.

The answer was sitting in the appendix to the case, a page I had skimmed. The software optimized miles. It did not know that one stretch of the new route crossed a bridge that ices first, which crews had always plowed early. It did not know that a school bus garage needed clearing before 5 a.m., or that a steep residential hill was impassable for the larger trucks it had assigned. The crews had shared these facts with their supervisors in the first week, and the supervisors had been told the routes were final.

Follett's Law of the Situation

The last paragraph of my notes changed with Mary Parker Follett. She argued that orders should come from the situation rather than from a person: when everyone studies the facts together, the order follows from what the situation requires, and the question of who obeys whom fades (Metcalf & Urwick, 1942). Applied here, the routes should have been issued as the software's proposal, tested against what crews knew, and revised before anyone was expected to drive them.

That is where my position moved. I no longer think discipline is the right first response. The crews' refusal was partly a defense of their informal order, as Mayo would say, but mainly a response to an order that ignored facts relevant to the work. Enforcing the routes as issued would have meant plowing the icing bridge late.

What I Still Hold From My Starting View

I have not abandoned Taylor entirely. The software's 12 percent reduction in miles is real, and most of it probably survives once the routes are corrected for the bridge, the bus garage and the hill. Crews driving their old routes indefinitely would waste fuel and time every storm. The method can be better and still need the workers' knowledge to become the best one.

What I Will Do Differently

The seminar changed how I would handle a similar rollout in my own workplace, where we are about to introduce scheduling software for maintenance technicians. I will ask the technicians to review the proposed schedules against what they know about each building before they are issued. I will treat their objections as information to test, not as resistance to overcome.

The Question I Still Have

I am unsure how far Follett's approach scales. A routing review with 22 crews is manageable. For a change affecting hundreds of people, studying the situation together with everyone may not be possible, and someone has to decide which local knowledge matters. I would like to know how managers decide when the law of the situation must give way to a decision made from above.

References

Barnard, C. I. (1938). The functions of the executive. Harvard University Press.

Mayo, E. (1933). The human problems of an industrial civilization. Macmillan.

Metcalf, H. C., & Urwick, L. (Eds.). (1942). Dynamic administration: The collected papers of Mary Parker Follett. Harper & Brothers.

Taylor, F. W. (1911). The principles of scientific management. Harper & Brothers.