OBHR330FinalPaper

Running head: ROBIN ASH AND PRINTZHOF PRESS CASE STUDY 1

Robin Ash and Printzhof Press Case Study

Byeong-Guk (Ryan) Kim

Aiwei Chen

George Townsend

Nick Ahlers

Rong Qu

Yuqi Jiang

Purdue University

April 10th, 2016

Executive Summary:

2ROBIN ASH AND PRINTZHOF PRESS CASE STUDY

This paper discusses the problems facing Printzhof press and their leadership teams.

Newly hired chief operating officer (COO), Robin Ash is charged with the responsibility of

turning around Printzhof and making them profitable again. The problem is the leadership team

that is currently in place seems to be stuck in the past and seems unwilling to change to to meet

the market demand. Included we have a summary of the case, as well as a diagnosis of all the

problems facing Printzhof. We have also identified solutions and ways that those solutions can

be implemented to solve the major problems that Printzhof Press faces.

Summary of Case:

Printzhof Press has a reputation for excellence and were considered by many to be the

most prestigious publishing company in the country. Lately business has been relatively slow


and executives of the company are searching for answers on how to increase profits for the

future. Robin Ash was hired as the chief operating officer (COO) to bring innovative change and

increase company profits.

Robin Ash is a Philadelphia native who graduated from MIT with a degree in computer

science. She has had an immense amount of success in her professional career and is known for

introducing new products and increasing sales. All of her past success lead to her getting

promoted to chief operating officer and is now charged with the responsibility of turning around

Printzhof Press.

Printzhof Press was started as a family business by Eric Nygren in 1848. It grew rapidly

publishing respected books in philosophy, history, and many other areas of liberal arts. The

Printzhof company has been passed down from generation to generation keeping very traditional

values. Earnest Nygren, who took over the company in 1990, believed in the same traditional

values that Eric Nygren founded the company on over a century before. In 1992 Earnest Nygren,

having no close relatives willing to take over the company, decided to sell Printzhof press to

Education and Entertainment Holdings. Education and Entertainment Holdings was formed in

1962 as an investment holding company looking to take advantage of rapid growth in the higher

education market.

The expansion of higher education coupled with many advancements in technology

throughout the second half of the twentieth century caused many changes in the publishing

industry. Some companies began to create online software programs to go along with their

textbooks. This was a very controversial issue among the administrative staff of Printzhof Press.

Being more conservative and traditional, they believed in learning through textbooks and print,


not online programs and e-books. Others believed that change is necessary in order to profit in

this industry and failing to offer this technology was causing their recent dip in profit.

Diagnosis:

Organizational Issues:

Printzhof Press has been losing its top position in education publishing market since

1940. There are many problems in the current system, ranging from minor to major. The crisis

started as Leif Nygren resisted changes to the textbook market except for the authorization of the

creation of new textbooks aimed at the community college segment. As the ancillary became

popular, Printzhof Press still focused on printing paper material only which caused it to lose

many customers as well as authors. One of the mistakes that Printzhof Press made is failing to

catch up with its competitors for 70 years. Unfortunately, Leif Nygren’s predecessors as well as

other managers followed his approach and ignored this problem. They all immersed themselves

in the past success and refused to fix anything. After Earnest Nygren had taken the job, no big

move had been done. That caused growth of Printzhof to decline considerably and finally the

family decided to sell the company. After acquisition, Lars Kross took the COO position with the

guidance of EHH as its parent company. However, Kross rejected the opportunity of producing

e-books which made EHH thought that he was not aggressive enough. Even though Printzhof

Press’s performance declines every year, it still retains the incredibly high human cost. It

provided generous salaries and benefits even though its employees have poor performance. The

culture of the company determined that it will focus on the employee's loyalty rather than the

expansion and competition. This basic underlying assumptions was deeply rooted in their

culture. The employees assume that upper management will always treat them with respect and

never let operational issues interfere. The irrational reward system is also a result of poor


evaluation system. In human resources department, all the employees are rated at least “above

average”. In this way, employees cannot be efficiently and fairly evaluated by their job

performance. The system of high salaries and poor evaluation system will make employees

highly committed to the organization in all three affective, continuance and normative way, but it

also will make employees lose motivation to develop themselves and the company’s current

strategy. In this way, their efforts are not linked to the outcomes and overall performance of the

company. As a result, there is no need to work hard. According to the expectancy theory, people

are only willing to work hard when they believe hard work will be awarded valuable outcomes.

However, in Printzhof employees will be awarded anyway. They may keep loyal to the

company, but responds passively toward any negative events. The company will be lack of an

important citizenship behavior called “voice”. “Good citizens react to bad rules or policies by

constructively trying to change them as opposed to passively complaining about them.”

(Colquitt, LePine & Wesson, 2015, p. 40) However, in this situation, we need people speak up

and offer constructive suggestions for change. Additionally, the tradition of primarily hiring staff

from Ivy League colleges that members of Nygren family attended, is bad for diversity of the

company. All of these issues result in the considerably decline of Printzhof Press every year.

The Problems:

Although there are plenty of organization behavior problems, the major problem that

Printzhof Press should focus on is their leadership style. More specifically, Leader Decision-

Making style needs to be improved if the publishing company wants to stay competitive in the

education market. Overall, the company provides employees too much freedom. High follower

control makes it easy for employees to lose their direction. Nygren felt operational issues were

best left to employees and said “they don’t need me to tell them how to do their jobs.”


Additionally, he emphasized that it is important to treat everyone with “decency and respect.” In

this condition, employees tend to set easy or “do your best” goals rather than have specific and

hard goals to reach when doing their jobs. Under Nygren’s leadership style, he expected his

managers to work out conflicts without him having to take sides or take charge. This is a typical

delegative style in which the leader plays no role in deliberation. This makes it difficult for

managers to set specific goals because they do not know exactly what their boss wants. Overall,

the effectiveness of leader is low. Even after acquisition, Printzhof Press still gets limited

interference from the parent company EHH. The situation got worse when company started to

lose authors and long-time institutions. However, the new COO Lars Kross who should revise

the “ancillary gap” has the same type of leadership style. In addition to failing to explore the

opportunity of ebooks and online resources, salary and administration costs of Printzhof were

still out of line compared to other divisions. As Bob Richards said of Kross, “he’s like Earnest in

that he trusts his employees too much and is reluctant to push them”. Clearly, Lars Kross still

relies on the delegative style to run the company. The delegative leadership style is effective

when employees are all ready to take responsibilities. At the same time, however, the leader still

needs to observe and monitor the direction of the company and make necessary changes.

However, because of the high salaries and poor evaluation system mentioned before, employees

clearly cannot fully take on their responsibilities. Furthermore, the slow response to the market

change indicates that the company is not in the right position to let employees self-manage.

Therefore, it can be concluded that Printzhof Press is using the wrong Leader Decision-Making

style. Because of this leadership style, employees as well as managers do not have a sense of

urgency. No one was taking the changes of competitive environment seriously.

Solution:


Although it may seem that Printzhof Press may be faced with problems that could put it

out of business, there are several solutions that can be implemented to put the organization back

on track. Printzhof Press is facing problems adjusting to the new market trend. As the diagnosis

states, there is an issue of “delegative leadership” that needs to be addressed within the

organization. The first issue revolves around “changes that needed to be made to the

organization’s culture and operations.” The second action item relates to “product development

related to ancillary packages to support the texts.” Finally, the last problem that was identified

was the ineffective use of “delegative leadership.” Printzhof Press needs to make changes in

order to repair the organizational problems it has and to be successful in the new trend of the

market. The following solutions identify creative and reasonable alternatives in order to resolve

the issues that Printzhof is facing.

It is definitely not easy to change the organization’s culture and operations due to the fact

that employees have been working under the old system of values and beliefs. This is the reason

Ash said, “I know that you’re retired, Earnest, but I hope that you’ll keep coming by. The

Printzhof family wouldn’t be the same without its patriarch.” (Harvard Business School Brief

Case, 2013). Robin Ash has a strong organizational behavior strategy and she knows how to

change the organization’s culture and operations without destroying the employee morale and

loyalty. When the leader is changed, a group of people can easily be affected due to the

perspective of the employee and the new environment they are put in. For example, it is hard to

determine whether the leader is considering restructuring or cancellation of team benefits. So it is

absolutely critical for leader give them stable environment which includes considerations of the

managers and employees. One effective solution was Ash’s strategy which was to keep Earnest

as patriarch is definitely stable strategy for employees to rely on and follow.


Even though Printzhof developed ancillary packages for online resources, it was not

adequate enough to meet up the new market’s environment. Ash can positively use the intimate

power that Paul Davidson has been building for almost 30 years at Printzhof. Under delegative

leadership, Paul was not aware of the importance of product development. However, Ash can

lead him to develop ancillary packages using his differentiated strategy that competitors cannot

achieve. According to the article, “Davidson was lavish with resources and his positive

relationship with current authors gave him access to a broad network of potential new authors.”

(Harvard Business School Brief Case, 2013). So when Davidson fully uses his positive

interpersonal relationship with programmers for multimedia projects, it will definitely make their

products different from competitors. Ash has to establish a core competency which requires a

strategy for maximizing their potentials. In order to accomplish this matter, Ash has to combine

potentials of Davidson’s abilities of broad network and unique technologies from programmers

on multimedia projects.

It is absolutely important to change some of aspects of human resources. As the above

diagnosis mentioned, they assume that upper management treat will them with “respect” and

doesn’t interference their operational issues which led their managers to inefficiently handle the

changes that were supposed to be done clearly. Managers and employees were lack of awareness

how market is getting more competitive and resist to change to the trends of market. Even on

performance evaluation form, everyone was rated at “above average.” From this environments,

managers and employees cannot be motivated and competitive to achieve core competence.

Ash has an experience of creating a new performance evaluation process when she was

working at Print Play. Under her new organizational behavior strategy and evaluation process

which were linked to the goal of Print Play’s overall EEH revenue and net earnings, employee


satisfaction was increased by 19% and also had a chance to acquire loyal customers. (Harvard

Business School Brief Case, 2013). She can elaborate this strategy again on Printzhof in order to

motivate managers and employees and ultimately achieve overall goals. One solution can be a

system of forced ranking instead of rating employees, managers and employees were likely to be

motivated on their duties and market trends. By using the forced ranking system, it will inspire

employees to do their best. Ash needs to point out that “delegative leadership” is effective when

employees are responsible. Under poor evaluation system, employees clearly cannot fully take

their responsibilities which led to poor performances. (Mayhew, 2012) She certainly has to

monitor the processes and set strong evaluation process. True leader has to understand the

relationship that low turnover rate on organizational behavior strategy is not always the best

when managers and employees are not motivated.

Action:

Transformational Leadership:

Although coming up with a solution to the problems that Printzhof press faces may seem

intuitive and common sense, implementing those solutions may be rather

challenging.Transformational leadership “involves inspiring followers to commit to shared

vision that provides meaning to their work while also serving as a role model who helps

followers develop their own potential and view problems from new perspectives.” Even though

management in all organizations should strive for this style of leadership, there are apparent

holes where this leadership style can be applied into the organizational structure of Printzhof

Press in order to solve some of the problems it faces.

In order to implement these solutions, Bob Richards and COO Lars Kross .should aim to

be more transformative leader and inspire, or offer an incentive for her employees to follow suit


While this task seems difficult, it is not impossible. They can encourage employees to think

more individually and creatively by setting a common specific goals for the company, and

distribute the goal for each part of the company, letting employees understand their own goal. By

creating task for everyone, they can perform better and work as a group. Because people can not

be motivated when playing a follower role. As mentioned above, the main problem of the current

leadership style is the lack of motivation. By distributing work to everyone, it will inspire the

passion of employees for their work. COO Lars Kross can set the sales goal for sales department,

and set the innovation goal for the marketing department or managers.

Not only the employees, but also leaders should improve their level of skill. In every

group, a leader usually considered as the model for the whole group. If the members of the group

see that the leader is positive and passionate, they will try to emulate that behavior. A number of

movements and trends are converging to give company the impetus to forge ahead on

innovation. Therefore, Bob Richards and COO Lars Kross must work hard and lead by example,

then require employees to work harder and improve their level of skills.

Organizational power:

In addition to developing a sense of transformational leadership, the upper management

of Printzhof Press should introduce organizational power to the publishing company. In terms of

the three sorts of organizational power, legitimate power should be applied into Printzhof Press

to implement the transformational leadership style. At the beginning of this case, in human

resources department, all the employees are rated at least “above average”. In this way,

employees cannot be efficiently and fairly evaluated by their job performance. Based on the

ability to assert influence, legitimate power should be exercised in order to solve problems

within the organization and point it in the right direction in terms of profits and market share.


The 360 degree feedback tool should be applied since the poor evaluation leads to bad results.

By using this tool, it allows employees to evaluate their peers, their managers, and their

subordinates.

Additionally, under Printzhof Press, many employees are citizens. They have high

commitment and low task performance. They need to be evaluated fairly and accurately in order

to push them to finish their task and goals. The leader should not apply the discretion leadership

style, everyone of Printzhof Press should get involved in. The inspirational appeal is most

suitable method for Printzhof Press. By setting a common goal for the entire company as well as

smaller departments, employees will respond with aggressive ploys and tactics to achieve those

goals. The goal should inspire employees to think together, create more ideas for Printzhof Press,

be innovative, and be challenged. For example, they can have a routine conference in the

morning and have a summary report at the end of the day to helping making everyone get

involved and to see the day to day progress.

Evaluation:

To evaluate whether the adjustment of the leadership style would be effective or not, an

evaluation of several different aspects must be done across the company.

Profits, Sales Revenue, and Cost Structure:

Profit is a very tangible indicator to which companies pay most attention to. The way that

company’s shareholders evaluate the managers is always by how large their profit margin is.For

the shareholders, the relationship between employees and employers, or between employees and

the authors, are not the things they routinely think about. The higher the profits, more dividends

they will gain. Therefore, it all comes down to the managers, before all the other things, they


need to make sure to keep the level of profits. In the long run, profits can be a good indicator of

what is working for the company and what is not.

To evaluate profits, the problem comes to the sales revenue and the costs. The data of

monthly or annual sales revenue and costs is needed. But we are not only calculate the certain

number of profits. Cost structure is also very crucial for Printzhof Press. The biggest cost that the

publishing company incurred was on the salary of the employees. Since there will be a push

from the salary side towards the employees, the salary costs percentage should be cut down. The

money that is cut from salaries could be used as the development costs of e-books and other

online resources that are part of the market trend. Generally, the costs structure will need to turn

from employees-leading to products-leading.

Market share:

Market share is another important part of Printzhof Press’ organizational behavior

evaluation. They were one of the greatest publisher in the market, but then their percentage of

market controlling went down. One of the biggest problem was the decrease of market share due

to their unwillingness of catching up their competitors on the e-book and online market.

An evaluation of Printzhof Press’ market share percentage will tell us whether the

solution and action described previously works or not. The main point will be the market share

percentage of e-book market. If Printzhof controls more of the market share, profits will increase

in turn.

High score on market share will lead to long-run success of the company. This part of

market share will continue making revenue (Wilbur & Farris, 2014). By introducing the e-book

along with other new products that are online based, Printzhof will gain a competitive advantage


against competing publishers. If their e-book market share go up, that will be a great proof of the

success of organizational behavior adjustments.

Employee Survey:

We don’t want to lose any great points from the previous company organizational style.

The relationship between the employees and the authors were really great and could have been

an attractive feature for potential employees. After all necessary adjustments have been made to

improve the profit margin and market share, the relationship between authors and employees

should remain unchanged.

A survey of employees’ opinions of the change of leadership style and the change of their

day-to-day and long-run working status will shows that whether the adjustment of organizational

behavior is proper or not. Example of questions could be:

1. From a scale of 1 to 10 (1 is the least while 10 is the most), how valued do you feel as

a employee? (Smith, 2013)

2. From 1 to 10, how satisfied do you feel of the management team now? (Smith, 2013)

3. From 1 to 10, how satisfied do you feel of the change which the management team

have made during the past 2 months?

4. Any other comment to the management team?

5. From 1 to 10, how satisfied do you feel about your relationship with the authors you

are dealing with?

6. From 1 to 10, rate the level of satisfaction from the authors to our company generally?

7. Any other comment about the relationship between the authors and you?

8. Do you feel that Printzhof Press is on the right track? Why?


The survey will be anonymous. The result will be analyze carefully and taken fully

consideration. The survey should be done every one or two months with a short version, and

every four months with a full version. There should be proper adjustment of the strategy of

organizational behavior after every survey. By having frequent evaluations of the relationship

within the workplace and different perspectives on where the organization is headed as a whole,

Feedback will keep all actions right on track.

Conclusion:

Printzhof Press needs to make major changes if they want to stay competitive in the

publishing industry. Changing from a delegative leadership style to a more transformational style

will encourage employees to be more motivated. Also, evaluating employees will also motivate

them to come up with new ideas to keep customers. Robin Ash and the Printzhof management

team must buy into these changes so that the company make the necessary adjustments to once

again become profitable. Printzhof will need to be more innovative in order to keep up with

market trends.


References:Jason Colquitt, Jeffrey LePine, Michael Wesson, 4 (2015). Organizational Behavior:

Improving Performance and Commitment in the Workplace

Cespedes, F., Clair, L. (2013, March 25). Robin Ash and Printzhof Press. Harvard Business School Brief Case 9-913-554.

Wilbur, K., Farris, P. (2014, June). Distribution and Market Share. Journal of Rerailing Volume 90, Issue 2. Retrieved from http://www.sciencedirect.com.ezproxy.lib.purdue.edu/science/article/pii/S0022435913000651

Meyhew, Ruth. (2012). What Are Four Competencies of an HR Manager? Retrieved fromhttp://yourbusiness.azcentral.com/four-competencies-hr-manager-3925.html

Smith, S. (2013, February 4). Employee Satisfaction Survey Questions: 3 Sample Templates You Can Use Today. Retrieved from http://www.qualtrics.com/blog/employee-satisfaction-survey/

Core Competence (2008, September 15) Retrieved fromhttp://www.economist.com/node/12231124

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