Monday, November 3, 2014

Example of Conflict in the Workplace

For this prompt, I thought I would use as an example my favorite movie and book, Moneyball. In this story, the main character, Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt in the film), faces the challenge of putting together a competitive baseball team despite having a payroll far less flexible than many of the other competing teams in the American League. After the 2001 season in which his A's were defeated in the playoffs by the New York Yankees who boasted nearly triple the payroll of the A's, several key A's players leave the team via free agency to sign with teams that could afford to pay them far more the Oakland could. In order to fill holes on the rosters without spending very much money both in the short and long-term future, Beane knew he had to approach free agency and the draft differently. Therefore, he turned to sabermetrics, the science and empirical analysis of baseball statistics. Using sabermetrics, Beane hoped to find value in players that other teams didn't see. However, this strategy also required that Beane overlook aspects of baseball and baseball players that others in the industry did value, including many within his own organization. This is where the conflict comes in. Beane's outlook conflicts with scouting director Grady Fuson (Ken Medlock) and manager Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman), both of whom believe in the more traditional approach to baseball operations. 

This conflict (Since Fuson and Howe have similar takes on baseball operations, I'll lump everything in as one conflict despite Beane having separate run-ins with Fuson and Howe) stems from a fundamental disagreement on how a baseball team should be put together and utilized on the field, but it goes much deeper than simply wanting what is best for the team for both sides. 

Beane realizes if he continues to approach building his team the same way as other organizations do, he'll lose because other clubs can simply outspend him. Therefore, he decides to find the most efficient way possible to put a team together. Through studying the sabermetric teachings of Bill James, Beane and his Assistant GM Paul DePodesta (named Peter Brand and played by Jonah Hill in the film) determine that the two statistics most closely correlated to scoring runs are On-Base Percentage (OBP) and Slugging Percentage. All other stats have lesser influence on scoring runs and therefore winning games. Therefore, Beane decides to go after free agents and amateur players based solely on their career OBP and Slugging. In doing this, Beane is able to find several players who other teams wouldn't look twice at. This raises eyebrows in Beane's scouting department. Fuson argues that these players cannot play as they are un-athletic, play poor defense, and lack raw power, an understandable argument coming from a scout whose job it is to find the most talented players in the world. Beane dismisses Fuson, noting that those other aspects, those that Fuson values, don't matter to him. 

When it comes to putting these players into the lineup, Howe refuses, applying the same logic as Fuson, that the players Beane has added are less talented and therefore shouldn't play. When Howe repeatedly disobeys Beane's orders to play the the players as Beane designed them to be played, Beane trades away the players in front of those he preferred on the depth chart, forcing Howe to play the players as Beane wants. 

Fuson and Howe could simply say, "oh well, Billy's the boss. If this fails, it's on him.", but that would not only violate their fundamental beliefs about baseball, which had been molded over decades in the industry, but would also endanger their future in the industry. In baseball, individuals are evaluated by the decisions they've made throughout their career. They are judged by these decisions even when they belong to someone else. If Howe would have played the players Beane demanded him to and those players were to have played poorly, it would be Howe that received the criticism from fans and the media. Also, he wouldn't be able to explain it in job interviews for managerial jobs in the future. He would either have to take the blame for the poor decision or admit that he was steamrolled by his own GM. Why was this a major problem for Howe? I mentioned earlier how thin the budget was in Oakland. With players being run in and out, Howe could bet he wouldn't last long there no matter how well he did. If the organization wouldn't put their faith in him with a contract extension, why should he put faith in their system, which could seriously damage his reputation? The same goes for Fuson, who felt his position would be all but obsolete with Beane ignoring scouting reports and basing decision solely on statistics. Both Howe and Fuson would have to take on a great amount of risk in order to follow Beane's orders, and considering Oakland would unlikely retain either even if the plan succeeds, the positive outcome was minuscule comparatively.

Despite Fuson and Howe feeling similarly about the situation, the two experience far different outcomes. Fuson resigns after getting into a verbal altercation with Beane (or so the movie depicts). In reality, Fuson left the organization for a Assistant GM postion with the Texas Rangers. Howe, on the other hand, lets the team be after Beane ties his hands and when the team eventually succeeds, Howe receives a fair amount of the credit. 

This shows that this particular conflict had very different potential outcomes. The interesting part of these outcomes is that they were reached through almost the set of circumstances. Neither Beane nor Howe made any compromises in order to reach a different outcome than Beane reached with Fuson. Perhaps Howe did give Beane a longer leash than Fuson did before he walked away from the organization. The important thing to note about the outcome and the conflict in general is that Beane, acting as the superior with control over the situation, would not have compromised on his strategy regardless of the consequences. He was ready to see his plan through even if meant losing his job in the case that his plan failed. 

This outlook of Beane's verges on opportunism when it comes to others in the organization, namely Fuson. As I mentioned earlier, the statistical element to Beane's decision making process to an extent replaced the scouting element. If Beane doesn't care about how athletic a player is or how his swing looks, why even bother with scouting? Beane's opportunity to find players at a better value to the organization meant potentially making the entire scouting department, including Fuson, obsolete and non-essential. The only step further Beane could have went with this process was to eliminate the scouting department altogether, which would cost several people their jobs. 

That action would have been one of several transaction costs of the new baseball operations system. "Adapt or die" Beane says in the film. Howe and Fuson were just two of many within the organization who had to either completely change their own approach to the game they had played and/or studied for years or find another job. 

Ultimately, Beane's plan was successful. The A's went onto earn the American League's best record in 2002 and Beane's system was implemented by several other organizations throughout baseball as a pinnacle of efficiency in a sport where efficiency was sorely needed. However, I don't believe one could argue very effectively that the specific conflict I've described went as well as it could have. Beane essentially worked around both Fuson and Howe, taking the bat out of their hands you might say. In an organization in which employees aren't as easily expendable, Beane almost surely wouldn't be able to treat Howe and Fuson as he did.

3 comments:

  1. This post came in a bit late. As that is unusual for you I will ignore that here. I hope it's a one off and you get your posts done in a timely fashion for the rest of the semester.

    In any organization, if management wants to take the organization in a different direction than it has been going, there is apt to be resistance by organization members who prefer the old way of doing things. So conflict can arise for that reason. Everyone understands this. At issue, then, is whether management tries to get buy in for the new way up front, so everyone feels a part of what is going on and doesn't feel left out, or if management imposes its will and lets the chips fall where they may. The benefit of the latter is that the entrenched staff can't mass to block the coming changes. But, clearly, it can lead to a lot of hard feelings.

    The way you told the story, might it be that Beane should have treated the scout and the manager differently, as the manager was still necessary even in Beane's eyes? If he had to fire Art Howe, what manager in his right mind would have been willing to come in as replacement? That question is worth posing.

    Beane's personality was the opposite of easy going. Might that have mattered for the story as much as the strategic/economic issues that were going on? You should ask that. A lot of conflict amounts to people with different types of personality butting heads. The expression goes - reasonable people might disagree. Presumably when they do they argue further to achieve some mutual resolution of the problem. That's not what happened here.

    There is a different issue that you should consider. The A's from a decade earlier, managed by Tony LaRussa, were quite successful and didn't see to need the approach the Beane established. Why couldn't they repeat that success by the same means? Why did they need a different approach?

    Also, and while I'm no student of the game any more, it seemed that both vintages of the team were ultimately implicated for steroid use. Might that have been the hidden answer to explain the success that others don't want to discuss now?

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  2. I apologize for the lateness. It is something that I don't plan on letting happen again. As far as your comments, you make several good points.

    You're right about the reason for the conflict being that Beane was making an organizational change that others in the organization, namely Fuson and Howe, weren't prepared for, nor were in favor of. Furthermore, what progressed the conflict to the point it was pressed to was that Beane was hell-bent on following his plans and didn't care what his subordinates thought, to the point that he didn't even bother telling them ahead of time or really even catching them up and explaining the plan to them once the plan was in full-swing. I agree that the lack of inclusion Beane demonstrated had as much to do with progressing the conflict as the disagreement over philosophies itself. This is also why there was such little compromise (none at all in fact) on Beane's part. He never thought of the situation as a two-sided disagreement, but rather an order that Fuson and Howe didn't like. Therefore, he made no attempt to reach across the aisle or see things their way, even from outside a philosophical sense, such as how following his instruction could be damaging to Fuson and Howe's career and reputation.

    I'm interested in your comment about how Beane may have treated Fuson and Howe differently because he needed Howe more than Fuson. I believe there was some difference in the treatment, but I'm not sure it was because Beane needed Howe more. In fact, since Howe carried more power in the situation (i.e. he filled out the lineup card every game), Beane's plan suffered more from Howe's disregard for Beane's orders. Therefore, I'm not sure what would have stopped Beane from firing Howe if he continued to disobey orders after Beane traded away the non-essential players. There is always a worry about how the clubhouse would react to Howe's firing, but eventually Beane would have needed to weigh the odds and decide if it was a small price to pay in order to get his plan off the ground. I think there would have been another manager willing to take a managerial job in the MLB regardless of those circumstances, perhaps not one with a very high pedigree, but one that will at least get the job done and follow Beane's wishes.

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  3. The reason for the A's to need a different approach than they had years earlier is a tricky and difficult one to explain. Essentially, the problem wasn't that Oakland didn't have a fair amount of talent (they had a top-of-the-line rotation featuring 2002 Cy Young award winner Barry Zito, and a solid lineup featuring 2002 AL MVP-winning shortstop Miguel Tejada), but rather that it was difficult to retain that talent. When amateurs enter the MLB via the draft, as most do, they are held under team control with a modest salary for roughly 6-7 years, depending on Major-League service time. Once those years are up, they are free to sign with any team if they hadn't previously signed an extension with the team that drafted them. This was the case for the players Oakland lost prior to the 2002 season, namely OF Johnny Damon and 2000 AL MVP 1B Jason Giambi. Soon after the 2002 season, the A's would be losing more of their star players (e.g. Tejada and SPs Tim Hudson and Mark Mulder had all left the team before 2005). If Beane wanted to win with the pieces he already had in place, he had a very short window to do so. Since he had little money to work with, he had to fill-out the rest of the roster with lesser-thought-of players. His system was a way of getting the most value out of the amount of money he did have to work with. It was either this or throw in the towel, trade off his star players one-by-one and begin rebuilding, hoping that all the pieces would click next time around.
    Side Note: Beane did have to do this following the 2006 season and will likely need to do so again in the next couple of years.

    As far as La Russa's Pennant-winning teams in '88-'90, whose payrolls were among the MLB's highest, the major difference is that those teams produced much larger crowds attending games. Oakland was a perennial league leader in attendance during that time, which produced more revenue to spend on bigger name players. However, I think for the most part, LaRussa's teams of the late '80s and Howe's teams of the early '00s were pretty similar. LaRussa's players were also very young, many being under team-controlled salaries. Mark McGwire was 25 years old and made just over $500,000 in 1989, for example. Also, if you look over Oakland's seasons since the MLB season expanded to 162 games in 1982, you'll see that they've faced the wave-like trend of a small-market team throughout that time, displaying bursts of successful seasons in between segments of poor seasons. Oakland was forced to rebuild not long after both the late '80s and the early '00s. This makes me think that the success of LaRussa compared to Howe and Beane was mainly just by chance. Most sabermetricians consider the playoffs to be a bit of a wash, considering hot streaks are so dominant in baseball. It is quite interesting also to note that those late '80s also featured a similar approach to the game itself as Beane's administration. The A's boasted a top-4 On-Base Percentage in the Majors in each of the 3 straight years they reached the World Series.

    I can't speak much for the steroid controversy, but I will say this. While it is quite interesting how 3 of the biggest names in the steroid controversy, Giambi, McGwire, and Jose Canseco all happened to play for the A's during one of these two periods, I wouldn't say there is much ground to say that they had an overwhelming impact on the team's success. In fact, Canseco only played in 60 regular season games in Oakland's 1989 Championship season and Oakland actually improved their record by 1 game in 2002, after Giambi left the team. I wouldn't say these players performances didn't enhance the team overall, but I wouldn't call steroids the secret to Oakland's success.

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