By:
Christopher Speer
Lawrence Bridges
 Mike and Jill have been butting heads for months
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now
Mike is a manufacturing manger at Auto Safety
Products
Mike is 55 years old and has worked in
manufacturing for most of his life
Spent the last 22 years at Auto Safety Products
Always felt some animosity toward the design side of
the firm
Found the engineers were unwilling to listen to the
problems faced in manufacturing
 Often complained that design department generates
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projects that run into all sorts of problems once they
hit manufacturing
Jill is 25 years old
Mechanical engineer with Auto Safety Products
Been with them since graduating college
Assertive and strong-minded
Believes she has to be effective in the male-dominated
world of engineering
Jill and Mike has to work together frequently on a
booster seat design in a variety of minivans
 Inability to work together has gotten worse
 Supervisor had to set up a meeting
 Adam Shapiro is the project supervisor
 Knew the two of them have not it off on the engineering
team and had decided the conflict had gotten to the point
where he must step in and help them settle it.
 He brought them in individually and asked them about the
problem
 Jill was the first person Adam talked to
 Jill’s problem was that Mike would not listen to her ideas
and downplayed the contributions that design can make to
concurrent engineering
 Jill suspects that Mike has problems with her because she is
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young and she is a woman.
This has made her push even harder for her point of view
on project disagreements
Mike’s problem is that he thinks the concurrent
engineering system and the booster seat team in particular
is a joke
Design engineers are still trying to push their ideas down
the manufacturing’s throat and he’s tired of it
Mike would like to go back to doing things the old way
However if forced to continue with the concurrent
engineering system he refuses to give into every one of Jill’s
ideas.
 Mike believes that engineers are
“uppity” and unwilling to listen to
the problems dealing with
manufacturing.
 As a female engineer Jill feels as
though she needs to be effective in
the male-dominated world of
engineering.
 These predispositions are definitely
negatively influencing the way
Mike and Jill approach each other.
 Obviously they are going to
automatically approach each other
because of their opinions.
 If Mike and Jill were to attempt to deal
with this conflict on their own I would
recommend that they use the
compromising conflict style.
 Compromising will allow you to achieve
both of your goals, resulting in a “winwin” situation instead of a “win-lose”
situation.
 No, because when the problem first
arose they had a hard time coming
to a common ground resolution
 If it wasn’t for Adam they would
have never resolved the problem.
Sit them both down together
and have them write down the
benefits that each of them bring
to the company.
Find a common ground
Use mediator
Check to make sure each parties
ideas are running smoothly
Integrative bargaining
Yes, because a mediator in the
meeting will keep things calm
as well as make sure both sides
get a fair compromise
 Would see the situation from a female
and side thus would take Jill’s side in
the argument
 Would conflict be viewed differently if
Jill was in a male position of power?
 Same sex, less confrontation?
 No because Adam handled this situation the
right way by bringing Mike and Jill in and
have them discuss the problem
 This way is more productive because they
can express themselves without knowing
what the other person had to say
 You can cover more ground by one-on-one
problem solving.
 Michelle D. Lane
 Professor at Western Kentucky University
 Team projects provide benefits to the education
process and provide experience that is valued by
some employers.
 Due to free-riding, scheduling problems and
differing goals, there are fragile grounds for team
conflicts
 Needs to be a better method of forming teams and a
process to assure shared goals by team members.
 Six steps
 Selection of interviewers
 Posting interviewee’s applications for review by
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classmates and interviewers
Hold a “Job Fair”
Selection of personal top choices by both
interviewers and interviewees
Instructor-team assignment
Forming and signing of the team contract
 The results showed that using the
faux hiring teams had stronger
influence on shared goals
 Fewer conflicts within the group
 Provides an example of a way to
prevent teamwork problems
 Article says to use a interview
process whereas the case study
doesn’t
 Liisa Huusko
 Department of Business and Economics
 University of Joensuu
 Joensuu, Finaland
 Article was about how the past 10 years that team
members enter the workforce as well as management
or leadership emphasis influences different images of
supervisors
 Team member who are not the same age have different
images of superviosrs.
 Team members not the same age have
different images of one another
 Male-female problem in the group
 Age
 Older generation wants to do the same
change and not adapt to change.
 Published in Los Angeles Times newspaper
 The players’ union and the owners can not come to
terms on money agreements thus causing a lockout
 At first they did not want to bring a mediator in but
they now have to try to speed up the talks
 Related to our case study because neither side could
come to a common ground and they had to bring a
mediator to help get to that common ground