Assignment Three Just Keep on Trucking This Boss Isn't ...
Assignment Three Just Keep on Trucking Q: What motivational and leadership techniques is Susan using when dealing with the unconfident employee? Explain why these techniques are successful. In this case, it is clear that the employee has a low self-esteem, which implies that the employee is dependent on receiving positive evaluations from others. Susan has acknowledged this and is addressing the situation through goal setting. This gives the worker a sense of direction/purpose in their actions as well as gives them a better understanding of what Susan expects the employee to be performing at. For goal setting to have the desired effect, Susan must ensure that she is clear in communicating what is expected otherwise the employee will hesitate and procrastinate because they are unsure of what to do. Furthermore, by setting challenging goals, Susan encourages participation of the employee and by following up these challenging goals with recognition it shows the employee that Susan is generally interested and invested in helping the employee improve their performance.
This Boss Isn’t Bossy Q: Use the situational leadership model to explain Krista’s leadership style. Is her leadership style appropriate for her situation? After analyzing Krista’s scenario and the actions she takes with her employees, her leadership style seems to favour both R3/R4 (participating and delegating). This can be seen, as the employees are clearly experts and don’t need to be told how to do their job, but still take input from management. All the employees can carry put tasks with little direction from management, all that management has to do is assign the task and let the employees do their job. Yes, I believe that this style is appropriate for her situation due to her lack of experience in the journalism field. Due to her inexperience she needs to rely on the good judgement of her subordinates to ensure that organizational goals are met and she does this by providing the goals and letting the employees do what they believe is best, in most situations. She is still there to provide guidance and instruction as to how certain tasks should be accomplished. This will provide her with the credibility and respect she desires from the employees by giving them the freedom to get the job done.
Tricia Mah Is it to Tricia’s advantage to rely so heavily on oral communication in her job? Explain why or why not? Also, explain how Tricia attempts to minimize communication barriers to improve her communication. Yes, it is to her advantage as the amount of oral communication builds a personal relationship with employees leading to a higher level of satisfaction/motivation in the workplace which in turn leads to better performance. It also builds an environment of openness and support that makes employees more comfortable in discussing issues/functionality in their job. Furthermore, in a job where decisions must be made quickly, oral communication allows information to
be quickly transmitted and also provides a non-verbal component that can stress a fact or generally enhance the message. Tricia has used both formal and informal communication to effectively get the desired message across to employees, whether it be sitting down 1-on-1 with the new employees or just walking around and having a chat. There are numerous forms of communication that typically occur in the workplace and the ones that are applicable to Tricia’s scenario are language, poor listening habits, perception, feedback and the information medium used to convey the message. By walking around and speaking with every employee face to face, the amount of information transferred is significantly greater than if it were on a flyer, posted on the wall. When addressing the form of language used, Tricia had to be careful and specific as she was dealing with staff of different ages, education and culture. She took the older staff aside and explained the situation and told them how important they were to the success of the change and gave them extra responsibility to ensure they were invested in making it work. Furthermore, she asked for constant feedback as new systems were implemented to help her improve anything that the employees saw, that she couldn’t. By receiving accurate and timely feedback, it was clear to Tricia that the employees knew what was going on and also acknowledged what her end goals were and provided advice on how they thought it would be best to achieve these goals.
Skill Basics and Applying Your Skills Q: The clerks are presently performing four tasks. Assume that in performing these tasks, all of the clerks have advanced to stage R4 of the situational leadership model. Furthermore, assume that all of the clerks have high growth needs. Redesign the clerks' job in order to provide more motivation for your part-time staff. Explain how your recommended changes will alter the core dimensions (skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and feedback) of the clerks' job. Currently, all of the clerks are capable of doing their tasks without being told how to do it effectively. With a high growth need, they must be given more tasks to perform otherwise they will find the job dull and will have no desire to remain working into their school days. By giving them more tasks, it will give the owner more time for administrative matters while giving the students the opportunity to learn and grow. Of the current tasks the manager performs, there are some that could be done by the clerks, with the proper guidance and training. These include ordering stock, visiting manufacturers, dealing with team representatives for jersey orders/other special orders, preparing displays, dealing with customers with special orders as well as researching new products. This would increase the number of activities that the clerks could perform and allowing them to use a number of skills/talents as well as build these skills/talents if they didn’t have them before. By allowing them to research products, visit manufacturers and order stock it allows them to follow the process from the manufacturer to the retail store. The process could also allow the clerks to follow the process even further by having them dealing with team representatives and following the custom order from manufacturer to customer. By increasing both
the degree of skill variety and task identity, it will provide the clerk with an increased degree of task significance as they will be able to directly tie their actions with an end product, such as a team receiving all of its custom gear or having the gear they researched and went to see at the manufacturer arrive in store. In regards to autonomy, the degree of change will be minimal at first so the manager can ensure they are doing the job properly and to the standards he has set. In time, some tasks degree of autonomy will increase but different tasks such as scheduling the work will remain in the hands of the manager to ensure no bias as to who is scheduled when. As previously mentioned, all the increases in tasks and will first be under the direct supervision of the manager (accompany him to manufacturer etc) so he can provide them with the necessary feedback to improve the skills needed to make the transactions successful. By providing them with all these new tasks it is clear that the clerks job will be enriched through the combination of tasks, the creation of natural work units and establishing client relationships. It is also extremely important that the manager is careful as to how much he increases the degree of skill variety, task identity and task significance through assigning more tasks in the workplace. If the clerks feel they are being given too many tasks to perform and aren’t receiving the compensation they believe to be fair, the job enrichment could have negative effects and force the clerks to quit. Q: Using the situational leadership model, explain how your proposed job changes will impact your leadership style as the owner/manager of the store. Currently the employees are at either the third or fourth stage of follower readiness for most tasks, but mostly R3 as they are students and your business input is needed to ensure that the task gets accomplished with your support. With the proposed changes, the employees will be performing many tasks that they have never done and will need a lot of guidance and feedback until they are able to perform at an R3/R4 level. The employees will be able to proceed through R1 reasonably quickly thanks to their previous experience in the store. As the manager you will have to tell them what needs to be done and how it must be done, which could be time consuming and stressful for both parties as neither are used to this level of training. The more the manager integrates them into the process of visiting manufacturers, ordering stock etc, the faster they will move into the R2 position. They are now much more familiar with the job, but there are still some elements they don’t understand and as the manager, you will need to show/sell them as to why things may be done a certain way. Once the employees feel more comfortable they will begin to proceed to R3 for some of the tasks, however they are most likely to remain in this position as the manager will most likely feel the need to still be involved in many of the decisions. The manager must be careful when telling the employees how to do aspects of the new tasks and must ensure they don’t treat them like an R1 employee for all the tasks they perform. This could have negative effects on the current productivity of the clerks and they may feel that the manager thinks they are doing the job wrong.
This Boss Isn’t Bossy Q: Use the situational leadership model to explain Krista’s leadership style. Is her leadership style appropriate for her situation? After analyzing Krista’s scenario and the actions she takes with her employees, her leadership style seems to favour both R3/R4 (participating and delegating). This can be seen, as the employees are clearly experts and don’t need to be told how to do their job, but still take input from management. All the employees can carry put tasks with little direction from management, all that management has to do is assign the task and let the employees do their job. Yes, I believe that this style is appropriate for her situation due to her lack of experience in the journalism field. Due to her inexperience she needs to rely on the good judgement of her subordinates to ensure that organizational goals are met and she does this by providing the goals and letting the employees do what they believe is best, in most situations. She is still there to provide guidance and instruction as to how certain tasks should be accomplished. This will provide her with the credibility and respect she desires from the employees by giving them the freedom to get the job done.
Tricia Mah Is it to Tricia’s advantage to rely so heavily on oral communication in her job? Explain why or why not? Also, explain how Tricia attempts to minimize communication barriers to improve her communication. Yes, it is to her advantage as the amount of oral communication builds a personal relationship with employees leading to a higher level of satisfaction/motivation in the workplace which in turn leads to better performance. It also builds an environment of openness and support that makes employees more comfortable in discussing issues/functionality in their job. Furthermore, in a job where decisions must be made quickly, oral communication allows information to
be quickly transmitted and also provides a non-verbal component that can stress a fact or generally enhance the message. Tricia has used both formal and informal communication to effectively get the desired message across to employees, whether it be sitting down 1-on-1 with the new employees or just walking around and having a chat. There are numerous forms of communication that typically occur in the workplace and the ones that are applicable to Tricia’s scenario are language, poor listening habits, perception, feedback and the information medium used to convey the message. By walking around and speaking with every employee face to face, the amount of information transferred is significantly greater than if it were on a flyer, posted on the wall. When addressing the form of language used, Tricia had to be careful and specific as she was dealing with staff of different ages, education and culture. She took the older staff aside and explained the situation and told them how important they were to the success of the change and gave them extra responsibility to ensure they were invested in making it work. Furthermore, she asked for constant feedback as new systems were implemented to help her improve anything that the employees saw, that she couldn’t. By receiving accurate and timely feedback, it was clear to Tricia that the employees knew what was going on and also acknowledged what her end goals were and provided advice on how they thought it would be best to achieve these goals.
Skill Basics and Applying Your Skills Q: The clerks are presently performing four tasks. Assume that in performing these tasks, all of the clerks have advanced to stage R4 of the situational leadership model. Furthermore, assume that all of the clerks have high growth needs. Redesign the clerks' job in order to provide more motivation for your part-time staff. Explain how your recommended changes will alter the core dimensions (skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and feedback) of the clerks' job. Currently, all of the clerks are capable of doing their tasks without being told how to do it effectively. With a high growth need, they must be given more tasks to perform otherwise they will find the job dull and will have no desire to remain working into their school days. By giving them more tasks, it will give the owner more time for administrative matters while giving the students the opportunity to learn and grow. Of the current tasks the manager performs, there are some that could be done by the clerks, with the proper guidance and training. These include ordering stock, visiting manufacturers, dealing with team representatives for jersey orders/other special orders, preparing displays, dealing with customers with special orders as well as researching new products. This would increase the number of activities that the clerks could perform and allowing them to use a number of skills/talents as well as build these skills/talents if they didn’t have them before. By allowing them to research products, visit manufacturers and order stock it allows them to follow the process from the manufacturer to the retail store. The process could also allow the clerks to follow the process even further by having them dealing with team representatives and following the custom order from manufacturer to customer. By increasing both
the degree of skill variety and task identity, it will provide the clerk with an increased degree of task significance as they will be able to directly tie their actions with an end product, such as a team receiving all of its custom gear or having the gear they researched and went to see at the manufacturer arrive in store. In regards to autonomy, the degree of change will be minimal at first so the manager can ensure they are doing the job properly and to the standards he has set. In time, some tasks degree of autonomy will increase but different tasks such as scheduling the work will remain in the hands of the manager to ensure no bias as to who is scheduled when. As previously mentioned, all the increases in tasks and will first be under the direct supervision of the manager (accompany him to manufacturer etc) so he can provide them with the necessary feedback to improve the skills needed to make the transactions successful. By providing them with all these new tasks it is clear that the clerks job will be enriched through the combination of tasks, the creation of natural work units and establishing client relationships. It is also extremely important that the manager is careful as to how much he increases the degree of skill variety, task identity and task significance through assigning more tasks in the workplace. If the clerks feel they are being given too many tasks to perform and aren’t receiving the compensation they believe to be fair, the job enrichment could have negative effects and force the clerks to quit. Q: Using the situational leadership model, explain how your proposed job changes will impact your leadership style as the owner/manager of the store. Currently the employees are at either the third or fourth stage of follower readiness for most tasks, but mostly R3 as they are students and your business input is needed to ensure that the task gets accomplished with your support. With the proposed changes, the employees will be performing many tasks that they have never done and will need a lot of guidance and feedback until they are able to perform at an R3/R4 level. The employees will be able to proceed through R1 reasonably quickly thanks to their previous experience in the store. As the manager you will have to tell them what needs to be done and how it must be done, which could be time consuming and stressful for both parties as neither are used to this level of training. The more the manager integrates them into the process of visiting manufacturers, ordering stock etc, the faster they will move into the R2 position. They are now much more familiar with the job, but there are still some elements they don’t understand and as the manager, you will need to show/sell them as to why things may be done a certain way. Once the employees feel more comfortable they will begin to proceed to R3 for some of the tasks, however they are most likely to remain in this position as the manager will most likely feel the need to still be involved in many of the decisions. The manager must be careful when telling the employees how to do aspects of the new tasks and must ensure they don’t treat them like an R1 employee for all the tasks they perform. This could have negative effects on the current productivity of the clerks and they may feel that the manager thinks they are doing the job wrong.
