Reference no: EM133783231

Question

FUN AND GAMES AT THE EXHIBITION A major soft drink maker has a prominent booth at the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto each summer. The company employs students at minimum wage to serve soft drinks to customers. There are no benefits, and the only opportunity for advancement is to become a shift supervisor, which pays only slightly more money. Shift supervisors are also temporary employees. The jobs are dull and repetitive-simply serving soft drinks all day. A manager with an enclosed office at the back of the booth is in charge but is frequently not around because the booth operates 12 hours a day, every day. Turnover is high on this job, with most employees not lasting the whole summer. Management does not trust these employees and makes this clear in many ways. For example, to discourage employees from "pocketing" any receipts, they have sewn the pockets shut on all employee uniforms. As further insurance against employee dishonesty, a count is kept of all the paper cups used in a day, and this is balanced against actual cash on hand. Although employees are supposed to be friendly and courteous to customers, they frequently are not. Furthermore, when the manager is not around, horseplay is frequent. The supervisors, who are usually the same age as the servers, either tolerate or join in the horseplay. In some cases, it gets so bad that customers are discouraged from approaching the booth. Many employees have found a way to augment the meagre extrinsic rewards of the job by simply retrieving used cups from the trash and reusing them. In this way, the employees augment their income, while the official count of cups and the receipts still balance. Not all employees participate in the horseplay or the cup fraud. This behaviour would violate their values, such as a strong work ethic or a strong sense of honesty-or simply because they are afraid of being caught. Denying themselves access to the extrinsic rewards received by the other employees, these employees often quit, leaving only dishonest and/or irresponsible employees. These are the only employees for whom the ratio of rewards to contributions is balanced-and the only employees likely to come back next summer! Thus, the reward system used by this company ends up creating a workforce of dishonest, irresponsible employees.

1. What are the main issues in this case? Summarize the issues you've identified in the case (point form is fine).

2. What do you think is causing the issues? Summarize your thoughts (point form is fine).

3. Of the three main categories of behaviours, what does the drink maker ideally want? What attitudes would they need to foster in order to drive these behaviours?

For each issue identified in Part 1, discuss what changes you would make, including how you would redesign the compensation system, to improve performance. Make note of the behaviour/ performance each suggestion is addressing.