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Dick Spencer Essay

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Fall 2012 MGT 585

Dick Spencer Case Analysis

Strengths as a Salesman Dick Spencer has had an interesting career. He began as a salesman at Tri-American Corporation and quickly worked his way up the corporate ladder to management level. He experienced many achievements and also many roadblocks during that time. This case analysis will examine some of the contributing factors to his successes and failures as well as provide recommendations on how he could have been more successful as a manager. Dick Spencer experienced great success very early in his sales career. His outgoing, likable personality could have factored into that success. High levels of openness to experience are associated with curiosity and a willingness to entertain new …show more content…

Cross-cultural differences can also be blamed for some of Dick’s problems at the Modrow plant. He had requested a transfer back to the United States and was instead appointed as plant manager in Canada where he was once again thrown into a different culture and expected to adapt. Scholars have blamed a lot of managers’ problems in cross cultural situations

Fall 2012 MGT 585 on their firms’ lack of pre departure training (Sanchez et al., 2000). It did not seem that Dick was given any sort of cultural training which may have been able to help him better adapt to his host countries. Although Dick Spencer was a successful business man, he was a self-proclaimed slacker when it came to accounting measures and human relations. According to Richmond, Wagner, and McCroskey (1983), “Two of the major concerns of most organizations in contemporary society are productivity and employee satisfaction. In profit-making organizations, productivity is directly related to achievement of the primary goal of the organization – increasing the profit margin” (p. 27). Dick focused on that primary goal by implementing many cost cutting procedures without regard to productivity or employee satisfaction. This is demonstrated in the siding department incident. Dick had become so single focused on cost cutting that he jumped at the opportunity to implement a new procedure, ignoring the concerns of his

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