Warren Oats was a highly successful employee of American Auto Suppliers, a Chicago-based company that produces specialty original equipment parts for Ford, GM, and Chrysler. Due to his excellent performance as a maintenance engineer, Oats was promoted to a senior management position, overseeing a division of more than fifty employees spread across multiple locations. Oats was confused. He has tremendous experience as an engineer but not as a manager, sitting in his office thinking about his new managerial responsibilities, he came to the conclusion that the key issue is the question of how to push employees to work harder, increase their contribution and record new successes for him and for the company. Oats thought that what helped him be a successful employee and get promoted was his way of doing things. So he decided to lead the staff to adopt that path. He began by introducing new rules and regulations that would change the culture of the division so that employees would follow his steps in carrying out their duties. He announced new monetary incentives for increased productivity. He redesigned the workflow, reformulated the work groups and modified a series of operating procedures. He also canceled the ideas program that was underway because he believed it was unnecessary since he had all the successful ideas that led to his promotion. With a desire to succeed, Oats instructed his first-line supervisors to monitor their employees and eliminate all idle time; he also asked them to identify those who would not be obedient to the new way of working. He also decided to cancel the previously scheduled monthly meeting with all groups. All in all, Oats thought, things should be much better. Production should have increased and his approach should have resulted in much higher levels of productivity and profits and consequently in a further success story for him as an employee. But that wasn't happening. Oats felt that people were not doing their best. Performance reports indicated that production was only marginally higher than before his appointment. But the company's human resources department began to notice that absenteeism and sick leave rates had increased, turnover had increased substantially and as a result the costs of recruiting, selecting new staff and training had increased. Management decided to address the situation and conducted an investigation.