Reference no: EM132944338

Case Study Assignment Clark Kent

Background Information

Mary Jane believes very strongly in working hard to do her best. During her four years in the Accounts Payable Department, she did just that and was rewarded with good evaluations and two promotions. Indeed, just three months ago, she had been made assistant manager of the department. This was a newly created position that involved managing the daily operations of the department's four member staff. Mary had immediately liked almost everything about her new job assignment, including the challenge and additional responsibility. However, she also had suspected that this promotion signalled a further deterioration of her boss' standing with the company.

When her boss, Jack Philips, was terminated two weeks ago, she was not really surprised. The strain between Jack and the company, which had been churning beneath the surface, finally erupted, and the events that led to his release happened very quickly. As a result, Mary was made Acting Manager of the department. She was told that this situation was temporary and would change when "all the dust settles." Nonetheless, she hoped and expected the promotion to be made permanent soon.

Things seemed to go well during her first week on the job. She was busy, but she liked the challenge of learning and doing new things. She thought that if the first week was any indication, managing the department would be both easy and rewarding. However, her optimistic outlook began to fade during the second week, when Clark Kent entered the picture.

Just four weeks ago, Jack had hired Clark to work on some special projects. This was two weeks before Jack was fired. At first, Mary had limited contact with Clark and knew very little about him or his assignments. During her second week as Acting Manager, though, this all changed very quickly as she started to receive complaints about Clark from various employees in the department. She started to pay more attention to him and discovered that the complaints were well founded.

Clark seemed to do three things that were creating problems. First, Clark's work often was late and contained many errors. Even though Clark had prior bookkeeping experience in Accounts Payable, that experience was in a different industry. Mary knew the systems and procedures used here were somewhat advanced and unique to this industry; anyone new to this system would have problems. On the other hand, Mary felt he had been on the job long enough so that he should be doing better than his recent work indicated. She also knew that Jack Philips had always done a notoriously poor job in orienting and training new employees. She gathered that Clark was no exception and that he was most likely inadequately prepared for this job.

Clark's second problem was, as a few of his co-workers put it, he didn't "pitch in." Rather than help answer the phones, for example, or volunteer to help someone else look up information or complete a report, Clark seemed content to sit at his desk and let others do it. Yesterday she had watched him let the phone ring at the desk next to his as he got ready to go to lunch.

Finally, Clark did not seem to get along very well with the others in his unit, and made no apparent effort to get to know them or be friendly. Since his co-workers were busy anyways, just the slightest hint of a cold shoulder from him meant they would make no effort to meet him even halfway. Through a confrontation that Mary had just heard about, he had even made an enemy of one of his co-workers.

Mary knew that she needed to take some action but was not quite sure how to proceed.

Case Study Analysis Overview

PROBLEMS OF THE CASE

- Within the case, there will be a number of issues and problems facing various individuals

- These issues and problems are usually symptoms of an underlying core problem or cause. Hence, they are normally explicit and clear to all

- Your job here is to identify and describe these issues and problems within this first segment (without directly referring to some underlying cause as yet).

- At this stage, you should justify problems/issues identified, from the case text, referring to paragraph and sentence numbers in the text of the case for the audience. For example, "in paragraph 3, sentence 2, one can clearly see how the manager is behaving towards

DETERMINING THE CAUSE(S) OF THE KEY PROBLEMS

- Based on the identified problems, an attempt should be made to determine their true, underlying cause(s) (also called the core problem).

- Sometimes a list of problems might be shown to have some underlying cause or different problems might have different causes.

- Once a cause or causes are determined, students must justify why these causes are potentially linked to the problems identified. Show evidence and logical reasoning here.

LIST OF POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS OR OPTIONS

- Once the cause(s) of the problems has/have been identified, students should now brainstorm and present a list of actions (possible solutions) that may serve as possible interventions to address the core problem(s) and associated/resulting issues within the case.

- This segment presents a brainstormed list of possible actions against the core problem; some justification on how each one is important (or why it was chosen).

- Remember these should include ones that you will actually select or implement for the case.

- No evaluation however is done on how effective each one might be.

EVALUATION OF POSSIBLE

SOLUTIONS OR OPTIONS

- For each possible action identified, students should present its advantages and disadvantages.

- These advantages and disadvantages allow for a careful evaluation of how effective and/or potentially damaging a particular solution might be.

IMPLEMENTATION OF KEY SOLUTION(S) OR OPTION(S)

- Students should show how the selected solution(s) will be practically implemented within the organisation (using ‘steps/stages' perhaps).

- In the implementation segment, explain how exactly your group will go about executing the plans involved in the recommended solution (e.g. timelines, budgets, types of strategies/decisions, who will be involved, resources to be used, etc).

CASE STUDY MARK OUTLINE

- Logical Organisation & Structure of Information

- Effective Analysis inclusive of

- Rational Argument

- Evidence

- Solutions

- Justification

Attachment:- Case Study Assigment.rar