Reference no: EM132157117

You are a manager at Marée Rouge Cosmetics International for five years now. When you first began at Marée Rouge, there was a marked lack of communication between the product development and marketing departments, and a good bit of distrust or actual hostility between members of these departments. Why these problems existed was not clear, and often even people in long-standing feuds seemed to have forgotten the original causes of these disputes. While these conflicts did not prohibit professional working relationships, it was obvious that they were hurting the overall operational effectiveness of two departments that needed to work closely together. About three years ago, Marée Rouge leased a new building and was able to house the two departments on the same floor while also giving all areas greater office space. (In the old building, the departments had been housed on separate floors.) Largely due to the greater physical interactions between the departments, you have seen a marked improvement in the communications and work relationships between departmental members. Now there is a strong working relationship between the two areas, and this relationship has lead to faster product development and deployment as well as the initiation of several innovative (and strong selling) new products. However, partly due to this improved firm performance and revenues, Marée Rouge has increased its workforce and needs to find new office space. Currently, the company is looking at a small office park location where each of the major areas can be housed in separate facilities. The office park is beautiful, is located more centrally to most workers’ homes, will be far more comfortable than the existing location, and provides easy access to major suppliers and customers. However, you worry that physically separating the two divisions will destroy their current strong working relationship and may even lead to the same problems that existed before between the divisions. While you know that the move has already been decided on by top management, you feel sure that they will be willing to listen to well thought out suggestions for maintaining the good relationship between the divisions. In order to develop such relationships, you have asked some of your colleagues to help you draft an overview of the situation and suggested methods for avoiding problems. Instructions: Develop a presentation to detail your desired goals for the move, what potential problems you see the new physical location creating, and suggestions for preventing (or reducing) these potential problems. Use all appropriate chapter concepts in developing this presentation. Also, due to the nature of the link between organizational design and organizational behavior, you should draw upon appropriate concepts from other chapters for your answer as well. Questions: What new links did you see between organizational design and organizational behavior? What organizational behavior principles could be used to overcome problems with a given organizational design? What organizational design principles could be used to improve organizational behavior problems? Could communication technology be used to help overcome the expected organizational design problems? Why or why not?