Question: ADDIS ABABA UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF COMMERCE
DISTANCE MODE OF LEARNING
MA PROGRAM IN PROJECT MANAGEMENT
TMA1. Organizational Behavior
Question 1: You are a manager of Customer Service Division of Ethiopian Airlines. Customers are from different countries with diversified personalities, backgrounds and cultures. From your experience most of the customers are aggressive, demanding and difficult to handle. Consequently the job is stressful and makes employees feel insecure. You have decided to apply the Big Five Model of Personality in order to understand your employees and their work habits because it is generally supported by an impressive body of research. You want to use the big five personality dimensions to match individuals with jobs to which they are well-suited.
Which personality dimension taps a person's ability to cope with this job? Discuss (your answer has to be based on the case presented here)
Question 2: Your department is made up of people who are very different in their lifestyles and their stages of life. Meron is a 23-year-old lady who is working for minimum wage. Yohannes is 60 years old, extremely wealthy and works because he enjoys it. Yanet earns a good living. She is single, 45 years old and has few relationships outside of the office. You have decided to attempt to apply Maslow's hierarchy of needs to determine what motivates each of these individuals.
What is the need that you would expect that each is trying to satisfy? Discuss
Question 3: Differing Perceptions at Clarkston Industries
Susan Harrington continued to drum her fingers on her desk. She had a real problem and wasn't sure what to do next. She had a lot of confidence in Jack Reed, but she suspected she was about the last person in the office who did. Perhaps if she ran through the entire story again in her mind she would see the solution.
Susan had been distribution manager for Clarkston Industries for almost twenty years. An early brush with the law and a short stay in prison had made her realize the importance of honesty and hard work. Henry Clarkston had given her a chance despite her record, and Susan had made the most of it. She now was one of the most respected managers in the company. Few people knew her background.
Susan had hired Jack Reed fresh out of prison six months ago. Susan understood how Jack felt when Jack tried to explain his past and asked for another chance. Susan decided to give him that chance just as Henry Clarkston had given her one. Jack eagerly accepted a job on the loading docks and could soon load a truck as fast as anyone in the crew.
Things had gone well at first. Everyone seemed to like Jack, and he made several new friends. Susan had been vaguely disturbed about two months ago, however, when another dock worker reported his wallet missing. She confronted Jack about this and was reassured when Jack understood her concern and earnestly but calmly asserted his innocence. Susan was especially relieved when the wallet was found a few days later.
The events of last week, however, had caused serious trouble. First, a new personnel clerk had come across records about Jack's past while updating employee files. Assuming that the information was common knowledge, the clerk had mentioned to several employees what a good thing it was to give ex-convicts like Jack a chance. The next day, someone in bookkeeping discovered some money missing from petty cash. Another worker claimed to have seen Jack in the area around the office strongbox, which was open during working hours, earlier that same day.
Most people assumed Jack was the thief. Even the worker whose wallet had been misplaced suggested that perhaps Jack had indeed stolen it but had returned it when questioned. Several employees had approached Susan and requested that Jack be fired. Meanwhile, when Susan had discussed the problem with Jack, Jack had been defensive and sullen and said little about the petty-cash situation other than to deny stealing the money.
To her dismay, Susan found that rethinking the story did little to solve his problem. Should she fire Jack? The evidence, of course, was purely circumstantial, yet everybody else seemed to see things quite clearly. Susan feared that if she did not fire Jack, she would lose everyone's trust and that some people might even begin to question her own motives.
Case Questions: a. Looking at the events in the given case, how do you explain role of perception and personality?
b. What should Susan do? Should she fire Jack or give him another chance? (Your answer should be based on your understanding of theoretical issues of perception, not your own feeling).
Question 4: More Than a Paycheck
Lemuel Greene was a trainer for National Home Manufacturers, a large builder of prefabricated homes. National Home had hired Greene fresh from graduate school with a master's degree in English. At first, the company put him to work writing and revising company brochures and helping with the most important correspondence at the senior level. But soon, both Greene and senior management officials began to notice how well he worked with executives on their writing, how he made them feel more confident about it, and how, after working with an executive on a report, the executive often was much more eager to take on the next writing task.
So National Home moved Greene into its prestigious training department. The company's trainers worked with thousands of supervisors, managers, and executives, helping them learn everything from new computer languages to time management skills to how to get the most out of the workers on the plant floor, many of whom were unmotivated high school dropouts. Soon Greene was spending all his time giving short seminars on executive writing as well as coaching his students to perfect their memos and letters.
Greene's move into training meant a big increase in salary, and when he started working exclusively with the company's top brass, it seemed as though he got a bonus every month. Greene's supervisor, Mirela Albert, knew he was making more than many executives who had been with the company three times as long, and probably twice as much as any of his graduate school classmates who concentrated in English. Yet in her biweekly meetings with him, she could tell that Greene wasn't happy.
When Albert asked him about it, Greene replied that he was in a bit of a rut. He had to keep saying the same things over and over in his seminars, and business memos weren't as interesting as the literature he had been trained on. But then, after trailing off for a moment, he blurted out, "They don't need me!" Since the memos filtering down through the company were now flawlessly polished, and the annual report was 20 percent shorter but said everything it needed to, Greene's desire to be needed was not fulfilled.
The next week, Greene came to Albert with a proposal: What if he started holding classes for some of the floor workers, many of whom had no future within or outside the company because many could write nothing but their own names? Albert took the idea to her superiors. They told her that they wouldn't oppose it, but Greene couldn't possibly keep drawing such a high salary if he worked with people whose contribution to the company was compensated at minimum wage.
Greene agreed to a reduced salary and began offering English classes on the factory floor, which were billed by management (who hoped to avoid a wage hike that year) as an added benefit of the job. At first only two or three workers showed up-and they, Greene believed, only wanted an excuse to get away from the nailing guns for awhile. But gradually word got around that Greene was serious about what he was doing and didn't treat the workers like kids in a remedial class.
At the end of the year, Greene got a bonus from a new source: the vice president in charge of production. Although Greene's course took workers off the job for a couple of hours a week, productivity had actually improved since his course began, employee turnover had dropped, and for the first time in over a year, some of the floor workers had begun to apply for supervisory positions. Greene was pleased with the bonus, but when Albert saw him grinning as he walked around the building, she knew he wasn't thinking about his bank account.
Case Questions: a. What need theories would explain why Lemuel Greene was unhappy despite his high income?
b. Greene seems to have drifted into being a teacher. Given his needs and motivations, do you think teaching is an appropriate profession for him?