Master of Business Administration

Transcription

1 Master of Business Administration Cohort: MBAPM/17B/PT MODULE: Organisational Behaviour and Human Resource Management MODULE CODE: HRMT5207 Duration: 3 Hours Instructions to Candidates: 1. This paper consists of Sections A and B. 2. Section A is compulsory. 3. Answer any two questions from Section B. 4. Always start a new question on a fresh page. 5. Total marks 100 This question paper contains 5 questions and 6 pages. This Question Paper is printed on BOTH SIDES. Page 1 of 6

2 QUESTION 1: (40 MARKS) SECTION A: COMPULSORY Team-building exercises vary from the serious to the absurd. From solving abstract puzzles to donning inflatable sumo wrestling suits, there is no end to the creativity of such efforts. While they may be fun and interesting, many team-building activities can be of little value if they are not planned and selected with care. Worse, they can be dangerous to the employee and to the company. In 2001, a dozen Burger King employees burned their feet attempting a fire walk as part of a program for building marketing teamwork. And earlier this year, an employee of security systems contractor Alarm One in California was awarded $1.7 million in damages and compensation in a suit in which she claimed she had been spanked on the job as part of a camaraderie-building exercise. Aside from those extreme examples, team-building exercises can be beneficial to employees and companies. In particular, such exercises can help managers and employees develop interactive skills and learn how to collaborate and communicate effectively, says Steven H. Carney, author of The Teamwork Chronicles: A Startling Look Inside the Workplace for Those Who Want Better Teamwork (Peak Performance Press, 2004). While teamwork-building events can be useful, the trick is separating the hype from the reality and realizing the limits of what they can actually accomplish. What Is the Mission? When considering a team-building exercise, the first step is to figure out what goals you are trying to achieve. Most of the time, people asking for these activities aren t interested in real teamwork building, says Doug Staneart, president and CEO of the Leaders Institute, a leadership training and teamwork provider in Fort Worth, Texas. What they really want is entertainment something they can use either to break the monotony of more serious meetings or to reward employees. Indeed, there are many programs that pass for teamwork building, but a lot of them are more like a Page 2 of 6

3 vacation in an artificial environment, says Carney, who owns Power of We Consulting in Denver. Real teamwork building is about developing skill sets that enable participants to collaborate better or to learn how to handle difficult situations that may have arisen in the team. The training may include instruction on how to communicate better, manage conflict, or understand the skills and talents that everyone brings to the table. It s serious business, says Laurie Hastings, manager of the HR planning, learning and development group at Altera Corp., a technology company headquartered in San Jose, Calif. We offer fun activities for our employees throughout the year, she says. But actual team-building activities are much more focused, strategic and committed to seeing teamwork becoming integrated into our day-to-day work. Such strategic team-building efforts start with a full assessment of the team s needs. Are you hoping to bring together cross-divisional employees for a long-term project and get them off on the right foot? Do you need to increase open communication and relationship building? Are participants actually hostile and mistrustful toward one another? Teamwork building can be used for all of these situations and others, but HR needs to prompt managers to get down to the core issues. Managers tend to come to HR with some kind of vague appreciation of what we used to call, in the organizational development days, a felt need a need that a manager knows exists but has not yet defined, observes Roger Manley, professor of management and organizational psychology at Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne. That s when HR needs to be more diagnostic and tie them down, he adds, by asking: What do you mean? How does that behavior show up? What is negatively affecting your team s performance? HR also may want to interview the members of the team to determine what is really going on, not just what appears to be going on. At Altera, HR is proactive, with the employee relations manager usually suggesting teamwork-building skills development to the team leader. HR also encourages managers to talk with their employees. For example, Anna del Rosario, director of Page 3 of 6

4 corporate communications, asked her team members to identify their weak spots and say what skills they wanted addressed. Smaller companies may wish to use the services of a teamwork-building vendor or of a consultant who specializes in this type of training. There are myriad assessment tools available, from short questionnaires to complex, comprehensive tests. In addition, there are numerous web sites that offer free or low-cost assessment tools. How extensive you want the assessment to be depends on your goals and your budget. If the problem can at least be addressed, if not resolved, through as little as a half-day workshop, a quick, easy, low-cost assessment tool should be enough to provide an overview of what needs to be done. If you are designing a half-day program, you don t want to spend $20,000 on assessments, Staneart advises. Spending on an assessment depends largely on the seriousness of the problem and can range from virtually nothing using a free online assessment to as much as the budget will bear. Melissa Williams, practice manager at Specialists in Pain Management in Chattanooga, Tenn., says she benefited from the assessment help her provider offered. She believed teamwork-building exercises could help her employees, but she really hadn t diagnosed the problem to see what specific skills they needed to focus on. We had seen a lot of growth and had been in constant transition for over a year, so my first thought was just to have something fun that would help us get to know each other on a more informal basis, she explains. It wasn t until her vendor helped her conduct a more thorough assessment that she saw how and why the relationships in the group had been breaking down and what competencies would help them address the problems. Bobbi Kaylor at Dabico Inc., a company in Costa Mesa, Calif., that provides ground equipment for airports, found it relatively easy to decide what to focus on, but she had been laying the groundwork for several years. The company s workforce had grown, and people were going in too many directions, says Kaylor, the HR manager. Teamwork proved worthwhile within individual teams, but there wasn t much interaction among the teams. People had become comfortable in their groups and weren t reaching outside for ideas and ways to collaborate, Kaylor says. They needed to be exposed to people on other teams; they needed to understand that everyone has something good to bring to the table. Page 4 of 6

5 According to Staneart, training that focuses on cooperation between departments is one of the most requested teamwork-building programs. The others most requested are communication skills development; working on trust issues, especially when there has been a merger or acquisition; improving feedback; and dealing with office politics. (Source : SHRM) (a) One way to ensure that we have high performing teams in an organization is through team building exercises. In this context, based on information from the case study, explain how far team building exercises are effective in building high performing teams in an organization. (20 marks) (b) Explain how Human resource managers must proceed before designing team building training programs in an organization. (20 marks) SECTION B: ANSWER ANY TWO QUESTIONS QUESTION 2: (30 MARKS) Organisational behaviour is a multidisciplinary field and a good understanding of organizational behaviour can help managers to manage their respective organisations in an efficient and effective way. In this context, explain the different disciplines that have contributed in the field of organizational behaviour and importance of understanding organizational behaviour in practice. QUESTION 3 (30 MARKS) Mauritius is investing lot of money in the Metro Express project and this will have an major impact on the Mauritian economy. The project managers are already forecasting that there will be a lack of skilled workers on the Mauritian labour market and they are planning to bring foreign workers from India. Explain what is the Human Resource Planning process and the importance of the HRP process in any project. Page 5 of 6

6 QUESTION 4 (30 MARKS) Performance appraisal is a key aspect of the Performance Management system. However, many people criticize performance appraisal since it has got lot of limitations. Explain the different limitations of performance appraisal and the different ways in which the limitations associated with the performance appraisal system can be reduced. QUESTION 5 (30 MARKS) (a) Employee induction/orientation is a very important aspect of human resource management but in practice, many organization do not carry employee induction in a proper way. Explain what are the main components of a proper induction program? (15 marks) (b) Job analysis is a very important tool for human resource managers. Explain the uses of job analysis in an organization. (15 marks) ***END OF QUESTION PAPER*** Page 6 of 6