MGMT 12e, Ch 2 What Would You Do? ISG Steelton - International Steel Group, Steelton, Pennsylvania. As the day shift supervisor at the steel plant, you grab the six college students working for you this summer. Their job is to do whatever you need done (sweeping up, sandblasting the inside of boilers that are down for maintenance, running errands, etc.). You walk them across the plant to a field where the company stores scrap metal leftovers. The area, about the size of a football field, is stacked with organized piles of metal. You explain that all of what they see has just been sold. Metal prices, which had been depressed, finally rose high enough for the company to earn a small profit by selling them. You point out that railroad tracks divide the field into different parallel sectors, like the lines on a football field, so that each metal stack is no more than 15 feet from a track. It will be their job to load the metal parts onto railroad cars that will be positioned next to each stack. Though about a yard long, and just over 4 inches high and 4 inches wide, each metal part weighs 92 pounds. Furthermore, each stack has 390 of these parts. Working as a team, you want them to pick up each part, walk up a metal ramp onto a rail car, and then neatly position and stack the parts for shipment. Thats right, you repeat 92 pounds, walk up the ramp, and carry them onto the rail car. Anticipating their questions, you explain that a forklift could only be used if the parts were stored on a wooden pallet (they werent), if the pallet could withstand the weight of the metal parts (it would be crushed), and if you, as their supervisor, had forklifts and people trained to run them (you dont). In other words, the only way to get the metal parts into the rail cars is for them to do it. Based on an old report from the last time that some of the metal was sold, you know that over the course of an eight-hour shift workers typically carried about 30 to 31 metal parts per hour up the ramp into a railroad car. At that pace, though, it will take your six college students six weeks to load all of the metal. Unfortunately, the purchasing manager who sold the stuff says youve only got two weeks to get this done. So, without more workers (theres a hiring freeze) and without forklifts, it all has to be loaded by hand by these six workers in two weeks. But how do you do that? What would motivate them to work much, much harder than they have been all summer? After all, theyve gotten used to the leisurely pace and job assignments. And while motivation might help, motivation will only get so much done. After all, short of illegal steroids, nothing is going to work once muscle fatigue kicks in from carrying those 92 pound parts up a ramp all day long. So, what can you change about the way the work is done to deal with the physical fatigue that cant be avoided from this kind of work? If you were the supervisor in charge, what would you do