Week 6 Essay Writing Assignment: A Crisis in Your Organization

Week 6 Essay
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Institutional Affiliation:
Week 6 Essay
A crisis in your organization
Today, most organizations are embracing ethnical diversity and women’s rights to increase employee and company performance in general. However, for this strategy to work all members of the organization have to embrace the change. A few weeks ago, in an organization I was working part time, a group of employees that consisted of 7 African Americans and 3 Hispanic women left the organization and filed lawsuits against their former manager for racism and sexual harassment. The lawsuit would have been a negative impact on the organization’s financial and operational performance in that fewer clients would want to work with a company that did not respect women and discriminated the color of its employees. The top management in a rush to cover up the matter suggested an out of court agreements to the affected party, but it failed. To make matters worse, the case was aired on media sources, giving the organization bad publicity. In a few days of trying to settle the case, the accused manager was relieved of his duties, leaving the company to pick up its damaged reputation and try to build it up again.
All employees had to attend mandatory training sessions that promoted ethnical diversity as well as women’s rights. This included prohibiting comments on the nature and color of others skin; relationships were forbidden, and policies were developed and implemented to prevent such occurrences in the future. The company suffered worse repercussions than estimated from the lawsuit. It was forced not only to spend on training sessions, hiring more employees of different ethnic backgrounds, but also had to intensify its advertising campaign. All this was just to manage the slowdown, it was experiencing regarding customer flow. However, social media was not making things for the company easy, considering that social media was its primary advertising backbone. Most of the messages posted reduced the company’s image, but after a few months, the crisis was under control with preventive measures in place so as to prevent a recurrence.
Crisis Anticipation and Prevention
As companies today embrace globalization, it is essential for them to anticipate for organizational conflicts both internally and externally that can affect the performance of the company (Poulsen, 2012). In other words, organizational leaders need to be proactive instead of reactive to situations. Crisis can be anticipated in the following three ways:
All crises portray early signs, and it is the duty of the management to be aware of any changes that can cause harm to the organization from striking employees to the market meltdown (Conkling, 2012).
When an impending crisis has been detected, the management has to be able to financially back up the company before the inevitable happens. However, with most companies today, especially banks, they depend on bailouts from the government so as to aid in their crisis management (Conkling, 2012).
Finally, for crises that can be managed/prevented, organizations need to put in place systems/committees that can be able t...