According to Berkes (2016), for over 30 years to his death, the engineer Bob Ebeling had felt responsible for the deaths in the failure of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986. He and four other engineers as contractors with Morton Thiokol urged NASA the night before the launch to postpone the launch, as data indicated it was not safe due to the projected temperature the next day. Bob Ebeling’s guilt over the years was based on his feelings that he had inadequately built his case for not launching. One of Ebeling’s colleagues, Roger Boisjoly, in an interview with Howard Berkes of NPR responded to a question of Ebeling’s feeling of guilt with: “We did all we could. We were talking to the right people who had the power to stop the launch.”
analysis of the political dimensions of the U.S. space shuttle Challenger disaster, including an evaluation of the interaction between ecosystems and organizational politics.
Conduct an analysis to explain the modes of political influences in the U.S. space shuttle Challenger case study (Chapter 9 in Bolman & Deal).
• Evaluate the impact of inter-organizational politics between NASA and Thiokol.
• Evaluate the impact to the ecosystem that NASA was operating in at the time of the U.S. space shuttle Challenger disaster.
Bolman, L. G., & Deal, T. E. (2017). Reframing organizations: Artistry, choice, and leadership (6th ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Chapter 9, “Power, Conflict, and Coalition” (pp. 181–200)
Chapter 10, “The Manager as Politician” (pp. 201–215)
Chapter 11, “Organizations as Political Arenas and Political Agents” (pp. 217–233)
Forrest, J. (2005). The space shuttle Challenger disaster: A failure in decision support system and human factors management Links to an external site.. Retrieved from http://dssresources.com/cases/spaceshuttlechallenger/
Links to an external site.
Morgan, G. (2006). Images of organization. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Chapter 6, “Interests, Conflict, and Power: Organizations as Political Systems” (pp. 149–206)
Exhibit 6.1, “Organizations and Modes of Political Rule” (p. 153)
