Organizational Theory and Practice
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Read the article "How Barbie Lost her Groove," by Nash and Duvall (2005). Compose a persuasive response that includes the following elements:
Explain why Mattel's managers were able to slowly change decision making over time and what kinds of cognitive errors contributed.
Explain and comment on any factors related to organizational culture and innovation within Mattel's setting that might have influenced the company to move in a more positive direction.
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Solution Summary
This response, based on the given article, "How Barbie Lost her Groove", discusses about Matter's managers change in the decision making and cognitive errors. Further, factors related to organization culture and innovation are also discussed.
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The most important reason of slow decision-making in Mattel was ineffective leadership. Robert Eckert joined this company during 2000. He was a conservative leader that affected the decision-making process of this company. Eckert failed to use range of established business intelligence in effective manner that caused delay in decisions in relation to the transformation of products and to the competitor's actions (Jones, 2012). Due to the poor distracted management, Mattel failed to reinvent its widely popular product "Barbie Doll" effectively that made difficult to response the changing needs of the customers.
In the words of Wu et al., (2014), effective business intelligence is a combination of human skills and technological system that foster decision-making in a business. The leader of this company was misinterpreted the goal of business intelligence systems and this created turmoil in Mattel and caused difficulties in responding competition. Leader failed to interpret the changing needs of little girls from the collected data and to make quick decision-making due to some cognitive error. Illusion of control was the major cognitive error that contributed in slow decision-making. Due to the extreme success of Barbie doll, executives at Mattel became overconfident regarding their control over situation that caused ignorance for the significant changes. This overestimated illusion of executives to defeat competitors and to overcome the challenges easily was ...
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