MGMT 230 Organizational Behavior-CENGAGE ASSIGNMENTS
Chapter 06: Assignment: Motivating Behavior with Work and Rewards
1. Job design and motivation (Connect, Perform)
Answer the following questions based on the information in this passage and your knowledge of Job Characteristics Theory.
Imagine that you are a manager at Applebee’s, a restaurant chain. Turnover is always a challenge with restaurant employees, and yours are no different. Your restaurant’s turnover rate is a little above the company average, and you would like to improve it. You believe that having better trained and more experienced servers will help you to decrease staffing costs and improve customer service and sales. Fortunately, you have a lot of control over how your restaurant’s jobs are designed and believe that redesigning the work might improve employees’ motivation, absenteeism, and turnover. You recently administered a survey assessing your employees’ job satisfaction, motivation, and perceptions about their jobs at Applebee’s that confirmed your suspicions. Employees provided a lot of honest information and additional comments that you think will be useful in restructuring your stores based on the
job characteristics theory.
One of the themes that came out of the survey responses is that employees feel bored and unchallenged because they only do a narrow job. According to the job characteristics theory, which of the following should you do to address this issue?
Improve task significance
Improve feedback
Improve employees’ growth need strength
Improve skill variety
After carefully considering the most recent employee survey results, you decide that the core issue that you need to address to improve employee motivation is that employees do not seem to know how they are doing relative to what is expected of them. Knowing this, which critical psychological state will you be most targeting in your job redesign initiative?
Experienced responsibility for outcomes of the work
Knowledge of the actual results of work activities
Growth need strength
Experienced meaningfulness of the work
Match each description with the corresponding job design term that best describes it.
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Description
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Job Design Term
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Rather than having employees perform only one step of the product packaging process, management let each packaging employee package an entire product to reduce boredom from repetitively doing a single task.
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Job Enlargement
Job Enrichment
Job Rotation
Job Specialization
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Rather than being a human resources generalist, Alice only handles payroll for her company.
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Job Enlargement
Job Enrichment
Job Rotation
Job Specialization
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Giving employees more responsibility over their work and letting them set their own hourly goals as long as their company-assigned daily goals are met is an example of which job design approach?
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Job Enlargement
Job Enrichment
Job Rotation
Job Specialization
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Some companies use this approach to decrease the likelihood of repetitive motion injuries from repetitive physical work.
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Job Enlargement
Job Enrichment
Job Rotation
Job Specialization
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2. Employee participation, empowerment, and flexible work arrangements (Connect, Perform)
Use your knowledge of employee participation, empowerment, and flexible work arrangements to answer the following questions.
As a new manager, you hope to improve employee motivation by creating a suggestion box. Your action gives the employees greater—–?——
Empowerment, Participation, Flexibility their work schedule
Identify what type of flexible work arrangement is shown in the following example.
You decide to reward your highest performing employee with this flexible work arrangement so that she can work four ten-hour days and have every Friday off as long as she maintains her high performance.
Job sharing
Compressed work schedule
Extended work schedule
You were recently promoted to a management position at a warehouse facility. One of your new responsibilities is motivating the warehouse staff and enhancing their engagement and performance. You decide to take a close look at some of the jobs to see if you can improve your warehouse employees’ engagement and motivation. Because you want to give employees every other Friday off but still have them put in an average of 40 work hours a week, what type of intervention would be best for this job and situation?
Compressed work schedule
Job sharing
Extended work schedule
3. Goal-setting theory (Connect, Perform)
Use these aspects of goal-setting theory to best complete the following sentences. Use each term no more than once.
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Goal acceptance
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Goal commitment
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Organizational support
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Reinforcement
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Goal difficulty
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Goal specificity
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Individual abilities and traits
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Goal-directed effort
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Management by objectives
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James did not like the fact that he had no input in his productivity goal. Because of this, his———? was low and he did not take it as seriously as if he had set the same goal himself.
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Carol always tries extremely hard to reach her performance goal. She takes it personally when she falls short, which rarely happens because she is so dedicated to reaching it. Carol’s —-?—- is high.
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After organizational and subsidiary goals are set, each manager meets with each subordinate to explain the unit goals to the subordinate. Together the two determine how the subordinate can contribute to the unit’s goals most effectively. This is called ——-?——–.
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For each example presented in the following table, identify the goal-setting concept being illustrated.
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Example
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Goal specificity
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Goal acceptance
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Goal difficulty
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Goal commitment
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Bob’s supervisor told him he needed to finish mowing the lawn in less than one hour. Because he was told what his goal would be and had no input, Bob never felt like it was his real objective and did not adopt the goal as his own.
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Sarah thought that she would be able to package 50 products an hour and made this her goal. Once she started the packaging she realized that other employees were doing much less so she lowered her goal.
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Once Molly reached her goal she stopped working hard and ended up performing much lower than she could have.
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Use your knowledge of the goal-setting model to fill in the missing labels in the following image.
![A chart represents the goal-setting theory of motivation. Goal difficulty, goal specificity, goal acceptance, and goal commitment influence goal-directed effort. Goal-directed effort, organizational support, and individual abilities and traits then affect performance, which determines both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards. These rewards in turn result in satisfaction.]()
A. Self-Efficacy, Goal-Directed Effort, Goal Level, Feedback
Feedback, Individual Abilities and Traits, Threat Of Punishment, Coaching
4. Performance management (Connect)
Use your knowledge of performance management to answer the question.
The—–?———- identifies financial and nonfinancial performance measures and organizes them into a single model.
Management by objectives approach, Balanced scorecard, Crossroads model
Use your knowledge of the balanced scorecard to answer the following question.
The balanced scorecard supports four key components of organizational success. Three of the components are customer perceptions, financial performance, and internal business processes. What is the fourth?
Business strategy
Brand value
Innovation and learning
Use your knowledge of performance management measurement methods to answer the following question.
To provide useful information for the decision maker, performance appraisals must be three things. Valid and reliable are two of the three things. What is the third?
Free from bias
Based on financial outcomes
Based on customer satisfaction
5. Reward systems (Connect, Perform)
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Reward system
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Symbolic value
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Base pay
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Indirect compensation
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Flexible reward system
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Surface value
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Compensation packages
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Incentive system
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Perquisites
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Participative pay system
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Use each of these individual reward system terms to identify the following reward examples. Use each term no more than once.
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If some of your employees need daycare, some want greater retirement contributions, and some want a more generous healthcare plan, which is the best reward system to implement?
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A car and driver, first-class travel, and a golf club membership are given to all employees at the Vice President level or higher.
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You receive a job offer with a $55,000 salary.
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To ensure that your organization’s new reward system best meets your employees’ needs, you create a task force comprised of people from all ranks and locations across the company to provide input into the new system.
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For each example presented in the following table, identify the type of reward being illustrated.
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Example
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Indirect compensation
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Incentive system
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Perquisite
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An employer’s contribution to your retirement plan is an example of this.
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When your work team comes up with an idea that saves the company at least $5,000, your team gets $1,000 to share among the team members.
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Although some examples of this are job-related and enhance productivity, such as a car and driver, they mostly seem to increase the status of their recipients and may thus increase satisfaction and reduce turnover.
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Use your knowledge of individual reward systems to answer the following question.
You believe that your manufacturing employees could produce more parts per hour, but that they need to be motivated to do it. You want to tie their earnings to the number of defect-free parts they produce every day.
Profit-sharing plan
Gain-sharing program
Piecework program
Use your knowledge of individual reward systems to answer the following question. Select the word or phrase that best completes the sentence.
Compensation should also be a ——?—– reward for the individual’s contributions to the organization.
Sizeable
Inequitable
Fair
6. Chapter 06 Video Case Study: Barcelona Restaurant Group: Managing Quality and Performance (Lead)
Watch the following video about Barcelona Restaurant Group and answer the questions that follow.
Transcript
Scott discusses how the general manager runs the store, and is responsible for the operations and for the performance of the restaurant overall. This is an example of what concept from job characteristics theory?
Satisfaction
Skill variety
Autonomy
Feedback
Use your knowledge of different approaches for setting up work to classify the following example.
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Example
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A compressed work schedule
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Job sharing
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Flextime
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Telecommuting
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Certain Barcelona employees must work specific days (e.g., Monday through Friday) and must be available from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. but otherwise can set their own schedule for when they will work.
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Assume you are Scott, the COO, of Barcelona Restaurants. One of your employees seems to feel like the he isn’t personally accountable and responsible for the results of the work he does at Barcelona. As a result, the employee feels dissatisfied and unmotivated. If you are trying to help your employee, what are the most important things you can do improve the situation?
Check all that apply.
Give more independence in scheduling the work
Give direct and clear information about the effectiveness of performance
Increase freedom to determine procedures for carrying out the work
Highlight how the job affects the lives or work of other people
Assume you are Scott, the COO of Barcelona Restaurants. You have worked with the managers to set goals such as “reduce the cost of food”, “increase quality”, or “improve profitability” but the restaurants have not demonstrated significant improvement in any of these areas. As a result, customer satisfaction and repeat business is down and profits are dropping. What might you do to help address this problem?
Set more specific goals such as keep cost of food to 24.3% of budget, or average 9.0 on a 10 point scale in customer ratings, or generate $342,000 in profit so managers know what to aim for.
Reduce the connection between performance and rewards because making bonuses and pay contingent on performance tends to create negative stress.
Assign easier goals because setting challenging and difficult goals tends to result in failure and creates frustration.
Make the goals more general so that the managers have more flexibility in which goals to pursue and so they are more likely to feel like they’ve achieved them.
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