Reference no: EM133170473

Only has to be 5-7 sentences for each question.

Questions 1.

Claire Callahan supervises the camping department of a large outdoor equipment store. The store manager (Claire's boss) has given her the goal of increasing sales by 10% during the next quarter.

Choose one of the three leadership styles for Claire (authoritarian, democratic, or laissez-faire). Then state at least three steps she might take using that leadership style to influence her employees to meet the new sales objective.

Questions 2.

Mohammed Abdul had been the best employee in the department. He is a highly skilled electronics technician. His work was always of the highest quality and he finished ahead of schedule. When you add in other qualifications such as attendance, dedication to the business, and pleasant personality, he was clearly the best choice for promotion to supervisor.

After two months on the job as supervisor, his boss, Rita Lang, is rethinking her decision of promoting Abdul. He looks incapable to get the weekly reports out on time. Mohammed himself expresses doubts about his ability to be successful in this new job. Rita agreed to observe carefully what was happening in order to help Abdul improve his supervisory skills.

Tasks to be accomplished by Mohammed and his department included completing all scheduled technical repairs on time, completing all weekly and monthly reports, developing the budget for the next year, completing the new Clingman project, developing a personnel requirement plan based on the projected sales, and developing a list of training requirements.

The department had a heavy work schedule, but everything could be finished on time with careful scheduling. Mohammed helped out by pitching in with some of the routine work while handling other tasks. The scheduling of the department suffered. Because of this, Ann, a new employee, was not kept busy. She asked often for additional work and felt uncomfortable when she didn't have work to do. She took long breaks to avoid looking like she was goofing off.

Doug Marcelletti was to work on the Clingman project. He was a skilled worker, but recently his productivity had dropped off. Mohammed said Doug was having trouble at home and was having difficulty concentrating at work. Mohammed decided to work on the Wingman project until he felt he could turn it over to Doug.

On Friday, the reports were not finished and other works were untouched. Even the list of repair work had not been completed. Mohammed decided to work late and finish a couple of the repair jobs himself. He was tired and dissatisfied when he finally left for the day.

A.) What should Mohammed work on and what should he delegate?

B.) Is Mohammed working on something that he should delegate? If yes, why do you think he is not delegating the work? If no, what do you think is going on that keeps him from accomplishing the goals of the department?

C.) Specifically, what should Mohammed do to get the respect of his department?

Questions 3.

The quality of service at Pal's Sudden Service, the Tennessee based fast food chain, is so high that the company recently won the prestigious Malcolm Baldrige National Quality award, joining the ranks of top performance conscious companies like Ritz-Carlton and FedEx. Pal's has taken many steps to streamline and improve the process of preparing and delivering food to customers in its 26 restaurants in the southern United States. In an industry where servers average one mistake every 15 orders, Pal's has narrowed its error rate to one in every 3,600 orders. That's an impressive record when you consider that a car rolls through Pal's drive through location every 14 to 18 seconds.

The menu is simple, so food sourcing and preparation are streamlined. Customer satisfaction is at 98%, and turnover among assistant managers is at the other end of the scale, under 2%. Among front-line employees, turnover is 34%, less than half the industry average. With a psychometric test and a probing job interview behind them, new entry-level employees receive 135 hours of training (far surpassing the industry average of two hours of training). These front-line employees are thus empowered and confident enough to make their own decisions and act independently. Continual retraining also helps them remain 'certified' in the skills they need to do their jobs well, including not just food preparation tasks, but also customer service (all pals customers interact with real people, not machines or microphones). Repeated perfect scores on periodic skills tests allow employees to become coaches who helped train and retrain their coworkers.

"Schools are usually satisfied with having a valedictorian in each class, a range of people they graduate, and those that don't make the grade," says CEO Thomas Crosby. "We want everybody that we hire to be the equivalent of a valedictorian if we are going to beat the competition." Crosby and all the upper-level managers at the company spend 10% of their time working with promising employees to help them improve their skills. Crosby wants his employees to remember what they learn at Pal's and take it with them to any future job or career they may tackle. Asked why he is willing to invest so much time and money in training employees who might leave the company one day, Crosby responds, "Suppose we don't, and then they stay?"

A.) What forms does quality take in a fast-food restaurant? That is, what aspects of the food, service, atmosphere, and so on do you consider to be acceptable in terms of quality, and what would exceed your expectations?

B.) Productivity efforts in a fast-food restaurant often include behind the scenes work in the kitchen. But in a service business, production includes interactions with the customer. Identify two ways in which Pal's supports its employees' productivity when it comes to working with customers.

C.) Using Pal's as an example, develop a list of ways in which quality and productivity can interact. That is, does any of the steps Pal's takes to maintain productivity help to support the quality of its customer service, and vice versa?