Ch. 8 Motivation: From Concepts to Applications
What is an advantage of bonuses over merit-based pay plan?
Employees are rewarded for recent performance.
John Dunker is one of the best firefighters in his squad, and he recently received an award for his outstanding performance. From this information, it may be concluded that John's job has low task significance.
FALSE
Which of the following statements is true regarding flexible benefits?
Flexible benefits can be altered to meet employee needs based on age, marital status, and number and age of dependents.
Which of the following statements is true regarding job rotation?
It decreases productivity in the short run.
________ bases a portion of an employee's pay on some individual and/or organizational measure of performance.
Variable-pay program
Which of the following represents a pay plan that rewards employees for recent performance rather than historical performance?
bonus
Job enrichment is the process of ________.
expansion of jobs by increasing the degree to which the worker controls the planning, execution, and evaluation of the work
Jack Holmes is a middle-aged, lower-level employee at an automobile service center. Though he is not paid very well, he loves his job. His supervisor speaks to him with respect, and he is the favored candidate for mentoring new employees because of the vast experience he holds in the job. Based on this information, which of the following is most likely to be the reason Jack likes his job?
recognition
Which of the following is Theory X consistent with?
the autocratic style of managing people
Employees who use the flextime option have to ________.
work from the office during the common core period and put in the extra hours per their convenience
Telecommuting is an option that suits professionals like ________.
analysts
Representative participation is characterized by ________.
compliance with the legal need to redistribute power within organizations
Core-plus plans consist of ________.
essential benefits and a menu-like selection of other benefits that an employee can choose from
Which of the following is the distinct characteristic of participative management programs?
joint decision making
A(n) ________ pay plan pays for individual performance based on performance appraisal ratings.
merit-based
A prerequisite condition for job rotation is the ________.
presence of employees with similar skill sets and requirements
Flexible spending plans consist of ________.
pretax dollars up to the dollar amount offered in the plan that an employee sets apart to pay for particular benefits
Which of the following series of dimensions of the job characteristics model (JCM) combine to create meaningful work?
skill variety, task identity, and task significance
Flexible spending plans allow employees to set aside pretax dollars up to the dollar amount offered in the plan to pay for particular benefits, such as healthcare and dental premiums.
TRUE
Job rotation can be applied in any setting where cross-training is feasible, from manufacturing floors to hospital wards.
TRUE
Which of the following, if true, would strengthen the argument in favor of adopting job rotation?
The company can enhance productivity of existing employees in various areas for different projects.
Explain how participative management can enhance skill variety, task identity, and autonomy as described in the Job Characteristics Model (JCM).
Skill variety, the degree to which a job requires a variety of different activities so the worker can use a number of different skills and talent, can be enhanced by participative management because it helps the employees view their tasks from a different perspective. It helps them understand why the management requires high productivity and efficiency from them. By learning to think differently, the employees learn different skills at the mental and relational levels. Task identity, the degree to which a job requires completion of a whole and identifiable piece of work, can be enhanced by participative management by allowing employees to make decisions on the spot without management approval. For example, the woman at the Wegman's bakery that convinced management to let her include a traditional family recipe in the product line will feel a much stronger sense of task identity. Autonomy, which is the freedom in determining work procedures and carrying them out, is enhanced by participative management because the employee is able to participate in the decision-making process. Having a voice in the process increases the sense of autonomy and control.
Jobs with high autonomy give workers a feeling of personal responsibility for the results.
TRUE
Compare and contrast the job characteristics model and mutual assistance programs in terms of how they lend meaning to an employee's role.
The first three dimensions of the job characteristics model—skill variety, task identity, and task significance—combine to create meaningful work the incumbent will view as important, valuable, and worthwhile. To be high on motivating potential, jobs must be high on at least one of the three factors that lead to experienced meaningfulness and high on both autonomy and feedback. By emphasizing the relationship between the employee and his or her work, this model represents a relatively individualistic manner of enhancing the meaningful nature of work. On the other hand, we have mutual assistance programs which represent a fairly social method for improving the meaningfulness of work. Employees who can help each other directly through their work come to see themselves, and the organizations for which they work, in more positive, pro-social terms. This, in turn, can increase employee affective commitment.
Discuss the relationship between social and physical work context and employee satisfaction.
The job characteristics model shows most employees are more motivated and satisfied when their intrinsic work tasks are engaging. However, having the most interesting workplace characteristics in the world may not always lead to satisfaction if you feel isolated from your co-workers. Having good social relationships can make even the most boring and onerous tasks more fulfilling. Research demonstrates that social aspects and work context are as important as other job design features. The physical work context is also likely to affect employee satisfaction. Work that is hot, loud, and dangerous is less satisfying than work conducted in climate-controlled, relatively quiet, and safe environments. This is probably why most people would rather work in a coffee shop than a metalworking foundry. Physical demands make people physically uncomfortable, which is likely to show up in lower levels of job satisfaction.
Nora Elm is a newly appointed HR manager at Seven Oaks, a famous PR firm that is not doing too well at present. As she assumed the post of the HR manager, everyone impressed upon her the need to energize the employees and motivate them to give their best to the job. After she met with the employees and managers, she felt that many employees were demotivated because they had attained their maximum potential in their current job roles. Additionally, she felt that though the management believed strongly in its employee-friendly nature, this nature was not manifested in its actions. Those employees who were on the board had begun to mimic the management's action of attributing the lack of any constructive change to company policies. Describe any two changes that Nora should propose at the meeting with a rationale for each.
The two changes that Nora could propose are job rotation or job enrichment and a more participative management style. Job rotation/ Job enrichment: Since the employees feel they have nothing more to learn in their current jobs, the act of job rotation would help them learn something new which would be motivating and beneficial to the company as well. For employees who cannot be moved to another job, different strategies of job enrichment, like enhancing the job vertically or combining their tasks into natural work units, would be an option. These would directly satisfy some dimensions of the job characteristics model. Participative management: The employees at Seven Oaks are demotivated not only because of the stagnant nature of their jobs, but also because the company is not truly employee-friendly. The company has nominated some employees to its board of representatives but this is only a symbolic act of employee involvement. Participative management, wherein employee and managers engage in joint decision making, will go a long way in motivating employees by giving them more autonomy and representation in the real sense.
Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of flextime.
There are several advantages of flextime. They include reduced absenteeism, increased productivity, reduced overtime expenses, reduced hostility toward management, reduced traffic congestion around work sites, elimination of tardiness, and increased autonomy and responsibility for employees. These factors help increase employee job satisfaction. The major drawback with flextime is that it is not applicable to all jobs. It works well with clerical tasks for which an employee's interaction with people outside his or her department is limited. It is not a viable option for receptionists, sales personnel in retail stores, or similar jobs for which comprehensive service demands that people be at their workstations at predetermined times.
How would you relate skill variety, job rotation, and skill-based pay?
These represent three ways in which the organization can promote development of relevant skills among its employees. Skill variety refers to the degree to which a job requires a variety of different activities tapping different abilities and skills. This primarily involves the relationship between the employee and his or her job and is an individualistic method of enhancing intrinsic motivation. Job rotation involves the periodic shifting of an employee from one task to another with similar skill requirements at the same organizational level. The strengths of job rotation are that it reduces boredom, increases motivation, and helps employees better understand how their work contributes to the organization. An indirect benefit is that employees with a wider range of skills give management more flexibility in scheduling work, adapting to changes, and filling vacancies. Skill-based pay is an alternative to job-based pay that bases pay levels on how many skills employees have or how many jobs they can do. For employers, the lure of skill-based pay plans is increased flexibility of the workforce: staffing is easier when employee skills are interchangeable. Skill-based pay also facilitates communication across the organization because people gain a better understanding of each other's jobs. However, people can earn all the skills the program calls for them to learn and then become frustrated when the challenges, learning, growth, and continual pay raises come to an end.
Some social characteristics that improve job performance include interdependence, social support, and interactions with other people outside work. Social interactions are strongly related to positive moods and give employees more opportunities to clarify their work role and how well they are performing. Social support gives employees greater opportunities to obtain assistance with their work. Which of the following statements is true regarding a merit-based pay plan?
Unions typically resist merit-based pay plan.
Beyond redesigning the nature of the work itself and involving employees in decisions, another approach to making the work environment more motivating is to alter work arrangements to meet employee needs. Which of the following is designed to give employees greater control of their schedule?
flextime
An advantage of the ________ plan is that because benefits accrue to groups of workers, high-performing workers pressure weaker performers to work harder, improving performance for the group as a whole.
gainsharing
At Dortix, a manufacturing company, at the end of every quarter, the total production of each department is calculated and compared with the predetermined targets; the rewards for each set of divisional employees are determined this way. Dortix uses a ________ plan to incentivize its employees.
gainsharing
Amanda McPherson is a working mother with one child and an ailing parent to look after in addition to her duties as a wife and job responsibilities as a legal consultant. Since Amanda always feels pressed for time, the news that the consultancy she works for would allow her to work from home two days a week came as a great relief to her. She now feels more motivated to work for the company, as the company has taken into account her personal and professional needs. The company has allowed Amanda to use the option of ________.
telecommuting
Job design is defined as the ________.
way the elements in a job are organized
On an organizational level, job design and by the extrinsic rewards of pay and benefits are the only ways to motivate employees.
FALSE
Recent studies indicate that employee recognition programs are associated with self-esteem, self-efficacy, and job satisfaction and the broader outcomes from intrinsic motivation are well documented.
TRUE
The chief concern of both individual and team piece-rate workers is financial risk.
TRUE
The term virtual office describes working from home on a relatively permanent basis.
TRUE
One of the methods of job enrichment is to expand jobs vertically. This method involves modifying the ________ dimension of the job.
autonomy
The two major forms of employee involvement are participative management and ________.
representative participation
Which of the following statements is true regarding employee recognition?
Critics argue that employee recognition programs are highly susceptible to political manipulation by management.
Which of the following is the major drawback of job sharing from management's perspective?
difficulty in finding compatible partners
________ is not a benefit of flextime.
Decreased work/life balance
Which of the following statements is true regarding an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP)?
Under this plan, employees acquire company shares, often at below-market prices.
Internal equity refers to the ________.
worth of the job to the organization
In which of the following variable-pay programs is the pay level based on how many skills employees have or how many jobs they can do?
skill-based pay
According to the job characteristics model, ________ indicates the degree to which carrying out work activities generates direct and clear information about your own performance.
feedback
A ________ plan distributes compensation based on some established formula designed around revenue of the company.
profit-sharing
The option of working at home at least twi days a week on a computer linked to the employer's office is termed as ________.
telecommuting
A flexible benefits package is designed for a male with a wife and two children at home.
FALSE
________ are predesigned packages, or modules of benefits, each of which meets the needs of a specific group of employees.
Modular plans
List and describe the various flexible benefits plans.
The three most popular types of benefits plans are modular plans, core-plus options, and flexible spending accounts. Modular plans are predesigned packages or modules of benefits, each of which meets the needs of a specific group of employees. A module designed for single employees with no dependents might include only essential benefits. Another, designed for single parents, might have additional life insurance, disability insurance, and expanded health coverage. Core-plus plans consist of a core of essential benefits and a menu-like selection of others from which employees can select. Typically, each employee is given "benefits credits" which allow the purchase of additional benefits that uniquely meet his or her needs. Flexible spending plans allow employees to set aside pretax dollars up to the dollar amount offered in the plan to pay for particular benefits, such as healthcare and dental premiums.
Sally Peterson, who works as an entry-level editor, wants to go for dental reconstruction surgery and sent a query to her HR department asking for a list of preferred hospitals. The HR looked through her healthcare plan, which provides only a minimum coverage for routine drugs and vision care. Consequently, the HR manager informed her that if she wishes to carry on with the dental procedure, she will have to pay for it on her own. Which of the following benefits plans should she choose to meet her needs?
a core-plus plan
Which of the following is an example of an intrinsic reward?
employee recognition
An MNC in a developing country is operating amidst severe space constraints, and the infrastructural conditions in the city are bad, causing a lot of lost man-hours. Anticipating rapid growth in the months to come, the company has created a recruitment plan based on its revenue expectations. However, it wants to manage this expansion without undertaking an expensive physical expansion. Which of the following could be a solution for the company?
telecommuting
Which of the following is an example of a piece-rate plan?
$2 for each unit produced
Andrew is a software tester. He runs through the same types of programs day after day looking for bugs and reporting them. He is taking night classes on programming. Often, he knows the best solution to many of the bugs, but he is still learning to code. Describe two job characteristics that Andrew is striving to improve, and explain two ways that Andrew's manager can redesign his current job to help him reach his goals.
Andrew is striving to have greater task identity, which is the degree to which a job requires completion of a whole and identifiable piece of work. He would like to not only look for the programming bugs, but be able to fix them. He is also looking for skill variety, or the degree to which a job requires a variety of different activities so the worker can use a number of different skills and talent. It is clear that he is bored with only the testing aspect of his job. Andrew's boss needs to redesign his job to include aspects of job enrichment, which refers to the vertical expansion of jobs. Job enrichment increases the degree to which the worker controls the planning, execution, and evaluation of his or her work. One way to enrich Andrew's job would be to put him in contact with his internal clients, the programmers. They could establish a set of bug recommendations that Andrew could fix, where he could begin to learn the types of code required. His boss should also open the feedback channels so that the programmers can tell Andrew when he is making proper adjustments and using his new skills adequately.
Differentiate between bonuses and gainsharing plans.
Bonuses represent a pay plan that rewards employees for recent performance rather than historical performance. An annual bonus is a significant component of total compensation for many jobs, and many companies routinely reward production employees with bonuses in the thousands of dollars when profits improve. However, when times are bad, firms cut bonuses to reduce compensation costs. Thus, using bonuses as a variable pay program makes employees' pay more vulnerable to cuts, and this is even more problematic when bonuses are a large percentage of total pay. Gainsharing is a formula-based group incentive plan that uses improvements in group productivity from one period to another to determine the total amount of money allocated. Gainsharing ties rewards to productivity gains rather than profits, so employees can receive incentive awards even when the organization isn't profitable. Unlike bonuses, gainsharing incentives do not vary with changes in company profits.
________ is a participative process that uses employees' input to increase their commitment to the organization's success.
Employee involvement
Job enrichment improves employees' skills by periodically shifting an employee from one task to another with similar skill requirements at the same organizational level.
FALSE
The major advantage of flextime is that it can be used for all categories of jobs.
FALSE
To enhance the amount of autonomy employees enjoy, a company must provide its employees with tasks combined into natural work units.
FALSE
________ is a formula-based group incentive plan that uses improvements in group productivity from one period to another to determine the total amount of money allocated.
Gainsharing
Which of the following statements is true regarding job sharing?
It allows two or more individuals to split a traditional 40-hour-a-week job.
A flextime arrangement requires all employees to be at their jobs during the common core period.
TRUE
Internal equity refers to the worth of the job to the organization.
TRUE
Which of the following statements is true regarding the job characteristics model?
The operation of the model is relatively individualistic in nature.
According to the job characteristics model, task significance is the degree to which ________.
a job bears an impact on the lives or work of other people
According to the job characteristics model, autonomy is defined as the degree to which ________.
a job provides the worker freedom, independence, and discretion
For employee stock ownership plans to be effective in improving performance, they must ________.
be implemented such that employees psychologically experience ownership
The external competitiveness of an organization's pay relative to elsewhere in the industry is measured by its ________.
external equity
The two most common forms of representative participation are ________ and board representatives.
work councils
Participative management is characterized by the symbolic representation of employees in work councils and board meetings.
FALSE
Which of the following statements is true regarding gainsharing?
Gainsharing focuses on productivity gains rather than profits.
What are the various dimensions of the job characteristics model?
J. Richard Hackman and Greg Oldham developed the job characteristics model (JCM), which proposes that we can describe any job in terms of five core job dimensions. These are explained below. a) Skill variety is the degree to which a job requires a variety of different activities so the worker can use a number of different skills and talent. b) Task identity is the degree to which a job requires completion of a whole and identifiable piece of work. c) Task significance is the degree to which a job affects the lives or work of other people. d) Autonomy is the degree to which a job provides the worker freedom, independence, and discretion in scheduling work and determining the procedures in carrying it out. e) Feedback is the degree to which carrying out work activities generates direct and clear information about one's own performance.
The periodic shifting of an employee from one task to another with similar skill requirements at the same organizational level is defined as ________.
job rotation
Which of the following alternative work arrangements enables the organization to draw on the talents of more than one individual in a given job?
job sharing
The job characteristic model fails to consider the role ________ plays in employee motivation.
social support
Woodworth & Baines is a retail chain that has taken up numerous measures to improve employee attitude, motivation, and organizational performance. New training programs, employee engagement initiatives, and an employee welfare council were the three main strategies implemented as part of the employee empowerment program. Norman Kilner was one of twenty employees nominated to the employee welfare council where they were required to interact with the management to promote the interests of the employees. Additionally, the job roles of these twenty employees were vertically enhanced to give them more autonomy in the organization. However, six months into the employee empowerment program, a survey by HR revealed no actual change in employee attitudes. Similarly, a survey conducted by the production manager revealed that work productivity had not increased by any substantial measure either. Which of the following, if true, would best explain this outcome?
Management retained the degree of control they had in the organizational affairs.
Compare and contrast the benefits of intrinsic rewards, such as recognition, and extrinsic rewards, such as pay, as forms of motivation.
Organizations are increasingly recognizing that both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards are important. Rewards are intrinsic in the form of employee recognition programs and extrinsic in the form of compensation systems. Intrinsic rewards range from a spontaneous and private thank-you to widely publicized formal programs in which specific types of behavior are encouraged and the procedures for attaining recognition are clearly identified. Pay, an extrinsic reward, is not the primary factor driving job satisfaction; however, it does motivate people, and companies often underestimate its importance in keeping top talent. No matter how much recognition a top performer gets, he or she will be tempted to leave if the pay scale is much lower than the market and another offer arrives. Variable pay structures, such as bonuses, are often the best production motivators. When pay is tied to performance, the employee's earnings also recognize contribution rather than being a form of entitlement. Over time, low performers' pay stagnates, while high performers enjoy pay increases commensurate with their contributions. An obvious advantage of intrinsic rewards like recognition programs is that they are inexpensive since praise is free. However, they are highly susceptible to political manipulation by management. When applied to jobs for which performance factors are relatively objective, such as sales, recognition programs are likely to be perceived by employees as fair. However, in most jobs, the criteria for good performance aren't self-evident, which allows managers to manipulate the system and recognize their favorites. Abuse can undermine the value of recognition programs and demoralize employees. Research suggests financial incentives may be more motivating in the short term, but in the long run intrinsic incentives will retain good employees if the extrinsic incentives are competitive.
A variable-pay program bases a portion of an employee's pay on some individual and/or organizational measure of performance.
TRUE
Employee involvement and participation (EIP) is a process that uses employees' input to increase their commitment to organizational success.
TRUE
Feedback is the degree to which carrying out work activities generates direct and clear information about one's own performance.
TRUE
The job characteristics model describes five dimensions of a job. A job can be enriched by modifying one or more of these five dimensions. Which of the following methods of job enrichment involves modifying skill variety and task identity dimensions of a job?
combining tasks
At Esco Retail, all employees are constantly driven to work hard. The company places maximum emphasis on stocking high quality goods and providing high quality service to retain the edge they have in the retail industry. To promote organizational commitment further, the company incentivizes employees by enabling them to purchase company shares at below-market prices as a part of their benefits. This mode of providing incentives represents the use of ________.
employee stock ownership plans
The job characteristics model describes any job in terms of five core job dimensions, and these five dimensions are skill variety, task significance, recognition, reward, and feedback.
FALSE
When the profits of Emm Corp rose steadily over two quarters three years back, the employees of the company were given the offer of purchasing the company's shares at subsidized rates. Many of the employees who bought the shares have become extremely rich after the phenomenal growth Emm Corp has had in the following years. This is an example of a bonus.
FALSE
Describe telecommuting as an alternative work arrangement.
Telecommuting refers to working at home at least two days a week on a computer linked to the employer's office. This strategy suits three categories of jobs: routine information-handling tasks, mobile activities, and professional and other knowledge-related tasks. The advantages of telecommuting include a larger labor pool from which to select, higher productivity, less turnover, improved morale, and reduced office-space costs. A positive relationship exists between telecommuting and supervisor performance ratings. The major drawback for management is less direct supervision of employees. In today's team-focused workplace, telecommuting may make it more difficult to coordinate teamwork and can reduce knowledge transfer in organizations.
The main drawback of representative participation as an employee involvement measure is that ________.
it is primarily symbolic in its impact
Individualized rewards that allow each employee to choose the compensation package that best satisfies his or her current needs and situation are called ________.
flexible benefits plans
Managers at Flavors, a restaurant chain, train their employees such that in the absence of employees, someone trained in the same skills can step in and do the job equally well. Thus, many modules in training are extensive as they provide employees with details of the skill sets required for different jobs. In practice, this lengthy training program does help the company as a well-trained and flexible workforce is at their disposal at all times. The managers at Flavors use ________.
job rotation
Adam Sears is an assembly line employee with Swenson Motors. Though Adam is popular among his supervisors and colleagues, Adam experiences low morale and lack of motivation. He feels frustrated that his job is restricted to fixing nuts and bolts on the car parts. He fears that he has no chances of advancing in his career as he cannot completely assemble a car. Which of the following is true with regard to Adam?
Adam's job has low task identity.
What is job enrichment? Describe various methods of job enrichment based on the job characteristics model.
Job enrichment expands jobs by increasing the degree to which the worker controls the planning, execution, and evaluation of the work. Various methods of job enrichment that are based on the job characteristics model are given below. 1. Combining tasks: It puts fractionalized tasks back together to form a new and larger module of work. 2. Forming natural work units: It makes an employee's tasks create an identifiable and meaningful whole. 3. Establishing client relationships: It increases the direct relationships between workers and their clients (clients can be internal as well as outside the organization). 4. Expanding jobs vertically: It gives employees responsibilities and control formerly reserved for management. 5. Opening feedback channels: It lets employees know how well they are doing and whether their performance is improving, deteriorating, or remaining constant.
The core dimensions of the job characteristics model can be combined into a single predictive index called ________.
motivating potential score
The ________ pay plan has long been popular as a means of compensating production workers by paying a fixed sum for each unit of production completed.
piece-rate
What is employee involvement and why is it important? What are the two major forms of employee involvement?
Employee involvement is defined as a participative process that uses the entire capacity of employees and is designed to encourage increased commitment to the organization's success. The underlying logic is that by involving workers in those decisions that affect them and by increasing their autonomy and control over their work lives, employees will become more motivated, more committed to the organization, more productive, and more satisfied with their jobs. The two major forms of employee involvement are: a) Participative management. Participative management programs use joint decision making. Subordinates actually share a significant degree of decision-making power with their immediate superiors. b) Representative participation. Representative participation refers to worker representation by a small group of employees who actually participate on the board. The goal is to redistribute power within an organization, putting labor on a more equal footing with the interests of management and stockholders.
Exsell is a popular consumer goods company known for hiring the best resources and using the best technology to produce an extensive range of goods. The manufacturing units consider productivity to be the only criterion; targets are upgraded, supervised, and rewarded amply. The groups with the highest productivity in each manufacturing unit owned by Exsell are incentivized using a substantial monthly monetary reward program. Of late, there have been some rumors about the company not doing very well in the market. Many claims of defective quality, declining market share, and employee unrest have been doing the rounds. However, the CEO of Exsell recently held a conference with the organization and the media to share its expansion plans for the coming year. He ended the conference with a discussion of how the profit margin of the company had grown substantially but many employees were left in doubt. Which of the following, if true, would indicate the need for Exsell to replace gainsharing with profit sharing as a variable pay program for its employees?
Executives who receive and evaluate client feedback have found a lot of quality concerns with the products dispatched in recent times.
Which of the following variable pay programs is free from dependence on company profits?
gainsharing
To be effective, an employee involvement program must ________.
incorporate the unique demands of different cultures
Which of the following factors represents the influence of social aspects of the work environment on motivation?
interdependence
An arrangement that allows two or more individuals to split a traditional 40-hour-a-week job is called ________.
job sharing
Janice and Shane are both senior software analysts. They have worked together on projects for six years and get along very well. Janice is anticipating the arrival of her first child and will not be able to work on a full-time basis in the future. Shane is contemplating opening his own business as a home media installation consultant and does not want to continue to work full time. They both need some income. Which of the following alternative job structures would be best for Janice and Shane?
job sharing
For management, the major downside of telecommuting is ________.
less direct supervision of employees
Daichi Inc. is a Japanese software development firm known for its high quality products. Recently, the company held its annual conference and awarded all those employees who were in the top five percent with substantial monetary rewards. Their performance was evaluated on the basis of target achievement, client feedback, and quality ratings. Employees whose performance had not changed drastically were given a minor raise and those who fared badly received no incentives. Many employees blamed the company for creating differences among employees because they felt that it would harm the company in the long run, but Daichi Inc. truly believes that to retain and motivate its best performers, a large incentive is a good step. Daichi Inc. is using a(n) ________ here.
merit-based plan
Employee involvement and participation (EIP) management is a method of management where ________.
subordinates share a significant degree of decision-making power with their immediate superiors
Samantha Barnes is an emergency medical technician. Recently, during an emergency call, she was able to resuscitate a man who had a cardiac arrest. Subsequently, she spent some time calming the 12-year-old daughter of the patient and looked after her until the rest of the patient's family arrived at the hospital. Based on this description, it can be concluded that Samantha's job is high in ________.
task significance
With reference to the job characteristics model, which of the following defines skill variety?
the degree to which a job requires a variety of different activities tapping different abilities
After the training and development manager at Add Worth, Nicole Hayes, resigned, the CEO has made it a priority that the position be filled soon by someone of equal expertise and experience as Nicole. To locate the right candidate, Jennifer Ray, the HR manager, has been contacting recruitment firms, checking job sites, and pushing for referrals from the employees. However, she has only found candidates with little or no experience in the field who were willing to work full time for the position. At the next meeting with the CEO, Jennifer proposes an alternative strategy; she suggests hiring two experienced candidates who are open to the idea of handling the training needs on a part-time basis as a team. The CEO listens to her proposal but is not too convinced by it. Which of the following, if true, would strengthen Jennifer's proposal to use job sharing for the vacant position?
A good proportion of the company's prized workforce comprises employees from the baby boomer generation who are set to retire in the impending future.
List and describe different variable-pay programs.
a) Piece-rate plans. In piece-rate pay plans, workers are paid a fixed sum for each unit of production completed. When an employee gets no base salary and is paid only for what he or she produces, this is a pure piece-rate plan. b) Merit-based pay. Merit-based pay plans also pay for individual performance. However, unlike piece-rate plans, which is pay based on objective output, merit-based pay plans are based on performance appraisal ratings. c) Profit sharing. Profit-sharing plans are organization-wide programs that distribute compensation based on some established formula designed around a company's profitability. d) Bonuses. Bonuses can be paid exclusively to executives or to all employees. Many companies now routinely reward production employees with bonuses in thousands of dollars when company profits improve. e) Skill-Based Pay. Skill-based pay (also called competency-based or knowledge-based pay) sets pay levels on the basis of how many skills employees have or how many jobs they can do. f) ESOPs. Employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) are company-established benefit plans in which employees acquire stock, often at below-market prices, as part of their benefits. g) Gainsharing. Gainsharing is a formula-based group incentive plan. Improvements in group productivity determine the total amount of money that is to be allocated. By focusing on productivity gains rather than profits, gainsharing rewards specific behaviors that are less influenced by external factors. Employees in a gainsharing plan can receive incentive awards even when the organization isn't profitable.
CalTrack Services has been facing employee-related issues like decreased productivity, low morale, and poor organizational commitment in recent times. At a meeting to discuss strategies to address these issues of immediate concern, Joe McEnroe, the production manager, proposed that the roles of employees working on key projects be enhanced to increase autonomy. He felt that this would enhance productivity, motivation, and accountability. Taking a cue from McEnroe, Paul Wilbur suggested job rotation as a solution to the problem they were facing. Wilbur felt that a change of job roles would make the employees keener to learn and perform. He emphasized that job rotation would help management create a larger skill base to choose from, depending on the needs of specific projects. Which of the following, if true, would weaken the argument of adopting job rotation?
The company is now entering its busiest business season with multiple project deadlines.
With reference to the job characteristics model, which of the following defines task identity?
the degree to which a job requires completion of a whole and identifiable piece of work
