The Road to Hell Case Study

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Racial Prejudice

Racial prejudice is defined as either making an adverse judgement or opinion based on race or having an irrational hatred or suspicion based on racial or religious group's stereotypes (Anon., 2016). Rennalls thought that Baker had addressed his incident with Mr. Jackson because he was European and quickly let Baker know that Mr. Jackson was a difficult person to deal with. This particular problem is caused by Rennalls’ time in London and his political background. He is quick to react to European favoritism. After the interview he went home and discussed the issue at hand with his father and this lead to him resigning. The strong political and racial consciousness at home really heightened Matthew’s anger about Baker speaking about his relationship with the expatriates. With him not being able to work properly with the racial prejudice present in his opinion this caused him to resign from the company.

Job Dissatisfaction

Job dissatisfaction can be clearly defined as an employee’s response to their job which can result in a numerous amount of emotions such as depression, despair, anger, frustrations and resentment. This can then lead the employee to have the desire to quit one’s job and move on to something better and many employees are in this situation right now. According to Study.com the causes for dissatisfaction are being underpaid, limited career growth, lack of interest and poor management (Anon., n.d.). Rennalls was dissatisfied and chose to resign based on how Baker approached him. His dissatisfaction with the job is seen only when working side by side Europeans that he couldn’t get along with. It would be the job of management now to work along with Rennalls and learn his grievances about working with the Europeans and look to resolve these. This is what Baker tried to do but his actions did not match his intentions.

Alternatives

The first alternative to be taken is that the company should apologise to Rennalls and offer him the position. It is important that someone reach out to Rennalls in the near future to see if the situation can be rectified. It would be in the company’s best interests to retain Rennalls for the Chief Engineer position seeing that he is very qualified and therefore an apology needs to be made. Additionally, management needs to address Baker regarding the inappropriate nature and comments made during his discussion with Rennalls. It is important that his behaviour change immediately before it further impacts the organization. Even though he meant well management should still speak with Baker on how to be more sensitive with racial issues.The advantage of this is that he accepts the offer to return so the company would have the best qualified person who already knows the organization well. However, the disadvantage of this alternative is that he does not accept the job and still hold resentment towards Baker and the other Europeans in the company. The company would now have to search for a new Chief Engineer or train someone and these both take time and money that could be avoided if the situation with Matthew Rennalls is resolved.

The second alternative that could be taken is to look for someone new to fill the vacancy. Looking for a new person will be indeed time consuming as stated before but the advantage is that they would have less conflict in the organization. Another disadvantage is that there is very little time to replace Rennalls seeing that Barker is leaving, so the time span to find someone new is a new constraint for the company. It would always be very costly to find the person than train them in the way of the company.

The third alternative is to wait and see if the situation would resolve itself. Sitting back and giving Rennalls time to cool off and possibly make a valuable return. The advantage of this is letting the conflict cool down before address the issues at hand. The disadvantage is that Rennalls could possibly never return to the company and they would be left with no chief engineer for a period of time.

The final alternative would be to try and get Baker to stay at the company. The advantage is that he is very experienced and knows the company very well. He can also train a new person to fill his place like he was doing with Rennalls. The disadvantage with this alternative is that Baker’s time is up amd there is no guarantee that he would stay. If he does stay it is uncertain how long, it could take to train someone as capable as Rennalls in the future.

Solutions

Improving Communication

Improving communication between Rennalls and Baker would have been a clear solution. Autonomy is defined according to the Merriam Webster Dictionary as the state of existing and acting separately from others (Webster, n.d.) . Autonomy in the relationship could have improved their communication problems. Baker and Rennalls did not have autonomy as they perceived but their behavior towards each other showed that it actually now as they thought. After the finally interview Matthew Rennalls wrote in his resignation letter “It has always been my practice to respect the advice given me by seniors, so after our interview, I decided to give careful thought once again to its main points and so make sure that I had understood all that had been said. As I promised you at the time, I had every intention of putting your advice to the best effect”. This showed that upon further thought about the interview Rennalls was not open to being scolded for his behaviour towards the expatriates. They could have spoken to each other more honestly confronting early with their problems with the other. This is supported by N.K. Humphreys. N.K. Humphrey’s declares in The Social Function that “I believe, essentially the same intelligence which has created the systems of philosophical and scientific thought which have flowered in advanced civilizations in the last four thousand years. Yet civilization has been too short lived to have had any important evolutionary consequences; the environment of adaptation of human intelligence remains the social milieu” (Humphrey, 1976)

Improving Perception

Company activities such as picnics and improvement in sports would be comradery among the employees. Building this team spirit promotes them to interact more which builds trust and they get to understand each other. These things create cohesion in the organization as seen in Aaron Marquis, article The Importance of Teamwork in Organizations. Marquis supports the cohension in organization when he states, “cohesion is an important