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Essay on Principles of Management

Decent Essays

Allison Reach
Mr. Michael King
Principles of Management
December 2, 2010

Case Application: Mixing It Up

In July of 2000, General Mills acquired Pillsbury from London based Diageo for $10.5 billion in stock and assumed debt. (All Business, A D&B Company) After the merger, managers from General Mills were now faced with integrating the two Minnesota based companies. A special concern that had been brought up was marketing issues. With such household names such as Pillsbury, Betty Croker, Green Giant, Wheaties, and Cheerios, the managers at General Mills had a large task at hand on how to continue to market the many brands under their umbrella. As said by Kevin Wilde, the company’s chief learning officer, they had wanted to …show more content…

The use of these types of teams creates the potential for an organization to generate greater outputs with no increase in, or even fewer, outputs (Stephen P. Robbins 249). According to Beth Gunderson, the director of organization effectiveness at General Mills, "you can leverage beyond people's functional expertise. "A person from human resources, for instance, would ask a provocative question [precisely because] she wasn't a marketer. And you'd see the look on the marketers' faces: 'Whoa, I never thought of that.' " (Gordon).

Aside from the many benefits gained by these cross functional teams, managers face some major problems. The same qualities that make these teams work, that they are large, virtual, diverse, and composed of highly-educated specialists, also work against it. Members of these complex, cross-functional teams are, as long as there are not any outside influences, less likely “to share knowledge freely, to learn from one another, to shift workloads flexibly to breakup unexpected bottlenecks, to help one another complete jobs and meet deadlines, and to share resources – in other words, to collaborate.” (Erickson). Some the ways that managers may deal with these issues is to look into the issues discussed in the next section.

There are a number of items that affect how a team works. These items include roles, norms, status, group size, and group cohesiveness. Roles are behavior

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