Reference no: EM132838881

CASE STUDY:

Julia Li has recently accepted her first full time job after graduating from University with a Bachelor of Commerce degree and a specialist certificate in Human Resources. She has worked very hard to obtain her degree and certificate. She never missed any assignments but always felt anxious about what her marks would be. Julia is very outgoing and loves to go out with her friends. She wants a job where she could develop her skills and fully use her creativity.

Julia's present job is working as a customer service agent at the 5-star Trumpeter Hotel in Downtown Toronto. At times, Julia feels overwhelmed by the job requirements and is often not sure of herself since she has never worked in a demanding customer service position. Julia frequently feels that she does not have the full ability to complete the duties of her job. She consistently blames others or the situation for her lack of goal accomplishment. She has also commented that she received very little training to do complete this job. Julia feels that her boss Larry, the general manager of customer service, does not like her very much because he seems to always criticize her work. She feels that her courteous approach and her attention to customer needs are being overlooked. For example, over the last couple of weeks she was very helpful to hotel guests with local travel plans and she sold an unexpected high number of spa services. Larry did not recognize her effort and productivity in any way. Larry did however recognize and praise Monica, who started working at the hotel about the same time as Julia did, provided less customer service, and sold fewer spa services than her.

Although not part of her formal job duties, Julia was recently asked by Larry to conduct performance reviews of three customer service department staff. Larry indicated that in the past, the reviews had been done by an employee who was currently on vacation. As there was a sense of urgency in having these reviews done immediately, Larry asked Julia to do them. He said that he was giving them to her because other employees were too busy with various projects. Julia was very apprehensive because she had never done performance reviews, was new to the job, and was not sure how to do the performance reviews. She decided to start with the performance review for Jeremy. Jeremy worked at the hotel much longer than Julia. Julia thought that Jeremy was intelligent and the most attractive-looking person in the department. She felt it would be easy to evaluate his performance.

QUESTION: How might you go about understanding Julia's motivation level using Expectancy Theory?