In this article we study the case of a big company called Metric Technology and the problems it faces due to an economic downturn. More specifically Metric Technology has decided to lay of some employers as a solution to the problem. Metric Technology relies on organizational design by geography, in other words it has units focused on serving the needs of a region separately. Metric Pacific, Metric Europe and Metric North America are the three major units of Metric Technology. Metric Latin America is one of the five subdivisions of Metric Pacific. It is organized by function which means that the employees form groups based on similar skills, expertise and functions performed. MLA has five departments: marketing, sales, distribution, finance and service with the first two to be the largest with eight and seven employees, respectively. All the departments report to a general manager called Roberto Noriega. The issue that concerns every employee in MLA is that in order not to lose their position everybody should cooperate and try to increase unit revenues 50% without adding extra staff. That issue arouse from the policy Metric Technology has decided to follow in order to cut down expenses. Of course everybody has decided to accept the challenge but first they must overcome some obstacles which came in the surface thanks to an employee survey. More specifically this survey showed that people who worked in the various departments weren't quiet satisfied from what the organization had to offer in the areas of vision, decision making, communication, compensation and career development. Moreover the basic problem in MLA is located in the two most important departments, marketing and sales. What happens is the following: Even though both have highly motivated, talented and prolific employees they lack of cooperation in order to achieve shared objectives. The alternatives for meeting MLA its new performance targets exist and that is of course finding solutions to the problems.
