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Javier Mendez

OBHR 3310.501 Edgington

Organizational Behavior

Job Performance (Park Place)

Unwavering Integrity. Passionate Service. Personal Commitment to Excellence

The Mercedes-Benz dealership located in Dallas is part of the prestigious and well known

Park Place ownership. Over the years the company has built a reliable prominent relationship

within the Dallas/Ft.-Worth area and continues to be the gold standard for car dealership

services. This is a direct result of their consistent integrity, commitment, and a winning attitude

that has resulted in an exceptional client experience reputation. This dealership in particular has

been acknowledge as number five in CSI (Customer Service Index) within all Mercedes-Benz

dealerships in the entire country. Through my observations at the dealership, I witness a great

deal of individual outcomes within all of the employees. The employees exhibit a great extent of

job performance and organizational commitment which explains for the exceptional success

created from the dealership.

The successes this dealership has achieved is seen through their high levels of task

performances. Park place gives their employees proper training and tools to preform exceptional

routine and adaptive task performance. For instance, with every technicians park place has the

employees go through a complete training program. The training program is an extensive

program lasting about a year which includes spending several months in a Chicago. The idea

behind the program is to have every technicians performing the same type of excellence service.

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This gives the technicians the ability to perform routine base task such as oil changes, alignment

readjustment and tire changes in quick efficient manner. With every employee trained by the

same program it allows the team to solve common issues quickly promoting less stress and more

focus on performing a quality job. The opportunity to create more focus on the job at hand and

less stress on the employees has increased the technician’s routine performance on a consisted

basis.

Other task performance that I observed was the ability to perform adaptive task on the

spot. Park Place dealership holds a prestigious name and is represented by its exclusive wealthy

clients. With clients of this caliber come many unique custom requests that are more or so

difficult for other dealership to perform. Here Park Place demonstrates its practice of effectively

using adaptive task performance. These requests include everything from custom paint jobs, dent

repair, and collision repair jobs. These services tend to be very unpredictable therefore the

dealership must have a strong foundation of adaptive task performance to properly handle their

client’s demands. Park Place understand by using adaptive tasks they can handle these

occurrences by having a paint shop and a collision shop on site, a first for any Mercedes-Benz

dealership. Having these extra facilities allows the dealership to adapt to any of the needs their

client’s request.

Other than task performance, I observed that the overall environment and atmosphere

also had a great correlation to the job performance. The workspace for the technicians could

easily be mistaken for a traditional corporate office. In this workspace I witness each technicians

working on their own assignment in their very own workstation. Each bay was assigned a name

which was held up high to verify that this was their personal workspace or cubicle. To the

everyday person this was nothing out the norm however in the career of a technicians this was a

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true privilege to have. It’s very rare to see a service department giving all their technicians their

own bay in where they can individual work on their own task. In reflection to this practice, I saw

a great deal of unity giving these employees a sense of ownership within the company. This

privilege environment of freedom helps the employees create significant levels of job

performance throughout the department.

Organizational Commitment

In conjunction to the individual outcomes is the astonishing organizational commitment

generated at Park Place. Park place shows prime example of the three types of commitments

affective, continuance, and normative. In regard to affective commitment the dealership strives

on creating that second family relationship with their employees. They take care of them by

catering large variety of foods and treats for them every Saturday. The dealership also has a

softball team where employees and their superiors can bond and help contribute to that second

family connection. Another commitment that Park Place really succeeds on is continuance

commitment. Many managers and head superiors all once had an entry level position and worked

their way up. Some of the head manager started as car washer and over the years took

opportunities to move up. This creates continuance commitment for employees who believe

following the same step will result in the same outcome. The thought of one day becoming a

manger and moving to higher positions motivates them to stay with the company. With the last

type of commitment, normative makes the employees feel sympathetic for their company as well

as their managers. Since Park Place has all their employees go through extensive training

programs, the employees feel a sense of debt and feel obligated to stay.

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The last aspect I witness involving organizational commitment was the presence of an

erosion model within the dealership. The basic concept is simple an employee with less bonds is

most likely to leave without confliction. However, with Park Place this concept is far from

simple as every employee seems to have more than one bond amongst its peers. The best proof is

when we learn that the dealership turnover for employees is a miraculous ten years. One year is a

struggle for almost any companies and this dealership manages to top it tenfold. This is a great

example of the erosion model as employees spent an average of ten years together creating long

lasting bonds. This falls back to affective commitment in the sense of building that second family

bond. The longer an employee stays the more connections that employee will establish and the

chances of withdraw behaviors and quitting will significantly decrease.

Increase Specific personnel (Improvement)

There were many cases where Park Place had customers with severe issues that required

significant amount of time to repair. In situations like this Park Place permits loaner car to each

and every customer if requested. Park place insists to their customers, regardless of how long

their service takes to rent a loaner car. However, the problem we observed was seeing a

consistent long line at the loaner car desk and the cashier office. Park place has only one cashier

and one consultant to handle all customer rentals request. For such a demanding dealership this is

unreasonable for two employees to control this service efficiently. We highly suggest Park Place

increases their number of cashier and consultants in the loaner car department to help manage

customers and prevent long lines.