M: Organizational Behavior 2nd Edition by Steven McShane, Mary Von Glinow

Exercise 99

Senior officers in a national military organization decided that operations in supplies requisition were inefficient and costly. They brought in consultants who recommended that the entire requisition process be 'reengineered'. This involved throwing out the old practices and developing an entirely new set of work activities around workflow. However, like many reengineering changes, this intervention resulted in lower productivity, higher employee turnover, and other adverse outcomes. Discuss the likely causes of these problems with the intervention in terms of systems theory.