4.9: Managerial Decision Exercise

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1. You manage the human resources department for a mid-sized retailer. Part of the operations consists of a call center with 100 employees spread over three shifts operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There is a main group with 20 people reporting to a shift supervisor on the main daytime shift from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. There are regularly scheduled times for breaks and lunch. Recently senior management reported to you that they were concerned regarding tardiness of some employees. While the customer relationship management reports signal that there are no service issues, senior managers are concerned that they are overstaffed. You feel that the daytime shift is the most experienced group, and you do not want to lose some of the best employees through termination. You also do not have any budget money to use for incentive payments aimed at reducing tardiness. What ideas from operant conditioning, behavior modification, and social learning theory would you use to reduce the problems of tardiness?

2. Organizations are facing changes in their business environment because of globalization of markets and competition, growth of immediate digital information and communications, growth of the service-based economy, and changes in rules affecting corporate governance and trade relationships. Assume the role of a CEO who needs to change their corporate culture and their standards of operation. The organizational structures in your industry have trended from tall, hierarchical bureaucracies to flat, decentralized operations that encourage innovation. Changes like this do not happen automatically. What theories and techniques would you use to change your organization’s culture?