1 . Although it%u2019s clear employees are not especially sat- isfied with their

Question

1 . Although it%u2019s clear employees are not especially sat-

isfied with their work, do you think this is a reason

for concern? Does research suggest satisfied workers

are actually better at their jobs? Are any other be-

havioral outcomes associated with job satisfaction?

2. Using job characteristics theory, explain why the

present system of job design may be contributing to

employee dissatisfaction. Describe some ways you

could help employees feel more satisfied with their

work by redesigning their jobs.

3. Lee has a somewhat vague idea about how to imple-

ment the cash rewards system. Describe some of the

specific ways you would make the reward system

work better, based on the case.

4. Explain the advantages and disadvantages of using

financial incentives in a program of this nature.

What, if any, potential problems might arise if peo-

ple are given money for achieving customer satis-

faction goals? What other types of incentives might

be considered?

5. Create a specific plan to assess whether the reward

system is working. What are the dependent variables

that should change if the system works? How will

you go about measuring success?

6. What types of hiring recommendations would you

make to find people better suited for these jobs?

Which Big Five personality traits would be useful for

the customer service responsibilities and emotional

labor?

Explanation / Answer

1. One of the main reason why most people are probably are not happy at their good paying job or minumum wage job is because most of them have not discovered their true passion in what they love to do in life. Usually, this could be a talent! I will say that there are some people who are happy with their job, which thier job connects with their passion of what they love to do! Due to so much work, it causes them to be burned out at the job, which can lead to a person not being happy there! If that job is not their passion! Contrary from that, most people have good and high paying jobs,and probably have a lot of money, which doesn't make them happy! The reason why most people are not happy at their job that pays well because that job doesn't connect with their passion of what they love to do! However, stress of that particular job can come so much until it causes most people to lose the mindset of being grateful for their job, and not be grateful their salary that they are making! Even though most people might have a good paying job, some of them have a fear to leave that job that they hate, and not search for another job! This reason is because most people have the mindset that there isn't another job out there that pays well! This cause happens because they have to provide for their family, and pay the bills! At the same time, they have a desire to leave their job! Now, I will speak that most people have discovered their their passion what they love to do! At the same time, most people are stuck at a job where they are unhappy to be at! This is because they desire to move on with what they love to do! Even though they use that job to get what they are going, but they desire to leave that job very soon! This could be a good or low paying job!

This other reason can be sometimes tricky! Why most people are not happy at their job is because of how they are being treated by other employers or the supervisor, or the customer to which causes them not to be happy at their job! Thier mindset is to be angry and bitter at the job due to how they are being treated! In other words, they are in a workplace that they have to deal with difficult employer or a boss! Sometimes, they had to smile a their supervisor,but deep inside they hate nor don't like their boss, but most of them know that it's important to respect their boss! The reason why I say that it is tricky because a person might have found their dream job, but they might have to deal with some difficult people. Even though most people don't want to deal nor fool with the difficult person, it causes their focus to move away to be grateful towards their job, and focused be angry at the person who is not treating them right! Sometimes, this leads to certain thoughts of quitting the job!

2. Job characteristics for satisfaction

Personality

According to the authors of Five Factor Model of Personality and Job Satisfaction, five personality characteristics have a major impact on job satisfaction. These traits are neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, conscientiousness and agreeableness. Neuroticism is the only one of the five directly related to lack of job satisfaction. The more neurotic an individual, the less likely he will be satisfied on his job. On the other hand, people who have a high degree of any of the other four traits have a better chance of being satisfied on the job.

Motivational Framework

One theory suggests that an employee's job satisfaction is directly related to what he thinks he deserves or what he thinks is important, rather than the fulfillment of his needs. For example, an employee may be able to make ends meet on a $25,000 salary. If the employee thinks he deserves $25,000, he will experience job satisfaction. If he thinks he deserves $32,000 per year, he will be unsatisfied in his employment.

Social Influence

The hypothesis of social influence in job satisfaction suggests that employees want what they think their co-workers want. For example, if the workplace culture is one in which employees want authority over their projects, a new hire will feel satisfied when he is given responsibility for a project. However, a new hire who perceives that other workers are jockeying for time off will want to see how much time off he can get. The social influence hypothesis links job satisfaction to getting what you think others want.

Self-Deception

Amir Erez and Timothy A. Judge of Cornell University conducted research into the role of self-deception in employee job satisfaction. They found that employees with a subjective sense of personal well-being were more likely to experience job satisfaction. They also discovered that employees who engage in some self-deception were more satisfied in their lives and in their jobs. The researchers defined self-deception as holding positively biased views of oneself, ignoring minor criticisms offered by others, discounting their own failures, avoiding negative thoughts and expecting a high level of success in their own efforts.

3. Reward Systems, or appraisal systems as it can also be called, are important for any company. A reward system is defined as a structured method of evaluating and compensating employees based on their performance. The compensations and rewards are known as incentives to the employees. The incentives can be bonuses in pay or added vacation or sick days, among other things. Reward systems can help to boost company morale, as well as productivity levels which increase overall revenue for the company. However, there are a lot of negatives that can come with reward systems if not implemented correctly. Sometimes, instead of helping with the company morale, it can hurt it by making some employees feel insignificant if the same people are being rewarded over and over again. Reward systems can be tricky if not implemented and carried out correctly, but when used effectively can have great positive impacts on the company and its employees.

There are several steps that one must complete in order to develop a successful reward system. To begin there should be a clarification of the key organizational issues that impact the reward policies and practices. A rationale should be introduced with a clear listing of how it will benefit the employees and the organization itself. Identifying the critical success factors of the organization will set parameters for employees to follow and goals that need to be achieved. After establishing these goals, a thorough review of the external trends and practices within a wide range of areas is essential to aid in the comparison of the amount of rewards that other organizations give. There are a couple drawbacks in an implementation of a reward system. In some cases, rewards involving money can become costly. Most organizations set competitive reward levels and base rewards on performance.

It is very important to decide whether the reward system will be based on performance, seniority or productivity. One concern based on rewarding due to performance is the difficulty of specifying what kind of performance is desired and to determine if it has actually been demonstrated. The figure bellow shows the steps that are necessary in order to implement a successful reward system.

Of course, every supervisor or manager will face challenges when implementing a new reward system into their company. One of the most common mistakes is not implementing the reward system in a way that makes it fair for everyone, including the employees who have been working for years without any incentives. Another mistake is having a strict set in stone way of

quantifying the results. By not having a standard method, it is much easier to make mistakes when determining who should be receiving an award. Some people will be left out; therefore company morale can be hurt. Also, it will start %u201Che got this%u201D %u201Cshe got that%u201D talk with the other employees if the reward system is not consistent with everyone in the company. This causes the sense of teamwork to decrease in the company. Another common mistake is confusing speed with haste. If there is an incentive behind completing a task by a certain date, an employee might try to hurry up just to earn the incentive instead of taking the time to do the work correctly. Lastly, there is a distinct difference between an individual reward and a collective award, or a team reward. A team reward can also affect the sense of teamwork because a member of the team can feel that he or she pulled more weight in the group than another member.

The incentives offered by a business vary depending on the type and size of the company. Someone working for a non-profit company will be offered different incentives than someone working for a for-profit company. The incentives can be just about anything from a monetary reward for hard work, greater visibility within the company, paid vacation time or even lunch with the boss. It all depends on the kind of company one works for.

4. Three Important Risks

Several years ago, Green Giant, a unit of General Mills, had a problem at one of its plants: Frozen peas were being packaged with insect parts. Hoping to improve product quality and cleanliness, managers designed an incentive scheme in which employees received a bonus for finding insect parts. Employees responded by bringing insect parts from home, planting them in frozen pea packages and then "finding" them to earn the bonus.

This is a relatively benign example, but it points to a serious problem. Incentives can enhance performance, but they don't guarantee that employees will earn them by following the most moral or ethical paths. Research by Wharton management professor Maurice Schweitzer and colleagues demonstrates that when people are rewarded for goal achievement, they are more likely to engage in unethical behavior, such as cheating by overstating their performance. This is especially likely when employees fall just short of their goals. Harvard Business School's Michael Jensen has gone so far as to propose that cheating to earn bonuses -- such as by shipping unfinished products or cooking the books to exceed analysts' expectations -- has become the norm at many companies.

When strong financial incentives are in place, many employees will cross ethical boundaries to earn them, convincing themselves that the ends justify the means. When we value a reward, we often choose the shortest, easiest path to attaining it -- and then persuade ourselves that we did no wrong. This tendency to rationalize our own behavior is so pervasive that psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson recently published a book called Mistakes Were Made (but not by me) to explain how we justify harmful decisions and unethical acts.

In addition to encouraging bad behavior, financial incentives carry the cost of creating pay inequality, which can fuel turnover and harm performance. When financial rewards are based on performance, managers and employees doing the same jobs receive different levels of compensation. Numerous studies have shown that people judge the fairness of their pay not in absolute terms, but rather in terms of how it compares with the pay earned by peers. As a result, pay inequality can lead to frustration, jealousy, envy, disappointment and resentment. This is because compensation does not only enable us to support ourselves and our families; it is also a signal of our value and status in an organization. At Google in 2004, Larry Page and Sergey Brin created Founders' Awards to give multimillion-dollar stock grants to employees who made major contributions. The goal was to attract, reward and retain key employees, but blogger Greg Linden reports that the grants "backfired because those who didn't get them felt overlooked."

This claim is supported by rigorous evidence. Notre Dame's Matt Bloom has shown that companies with higher pay inequality suffer from greater manager and employee turnover. He also finds that major league baseball teams with larger gaps between the highest-paid and lowest-paid players lose more games; they score fewer runs and let in more runs than teams with more compressed pay distributions. The benefits to the high performers are seemingly outweighed by the costs to the low performers, who apparently feel unfairly treated and reduce their effort as a result.

Similarly, Phyllis Siegel at Rutgers and Donald Hambrick at Penn State have shown that high-technology firms with greater pay inequality in their top management teams have lower average market-to-book value and shareholder returns. The researchers explain: "Although a pay scheme that rewards individuals based on their respective values to the firm does not seem unhealthy on the surface, it can potentially generate negative effects on collaboration, as executives engage in invidious comparisons with each other."

Other studies have shown that executives are more likely to leave companies with high pay inequality. The bottom line here is that financial incentives, by definition, create inequalities in pay that often undermine performance, collaboration and retention.

A third risk of financial incentives lies in reducing intrinsic motivation. In the 1970s, Stanford's Mark Lepper and colleagues designed a study in which participants were invited to play games for fun. The researchers then began providing rewards for success. When they took away the rewards, participants stopped playing. What started as a fun game became work when performance was rewarded. This is known as the overjustification effect: Our intrinsic interest in a task can be overshadowed by a strong incentive, which convinces us that we are working for the incentive. Numerous studies spearheaded by University of Rochester psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan have shown that rewards often undermine our intrinsic motivation to work on interesting, challenging tasks -- especially when they are announced in advance or delivered in a controlling manner.

Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose

So, the good results generated by financial incentives need to be weighed against the bad: encouraging unethical behavior; creating pay inequality that reduces performance and increases turnover; and decreasing intrinsic interest in the work. To limit the negative effects, we recommend that financial incentives should be (a) used primarily for tasks that are uninteresting to most employees, (b) delivered in small sizes so that they do not undermine intrinsic motivation and (c) supplemented with major initiatives to support intrinsic motivation.

Stanford's Chip Heath has shown that managers tend to have a strong bias in favor of extrinsic incentives: They rely too heavily on financial rewards, underestimating the importance of intrinsic motivation. In Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Daniel Pink summarizes a rich body of evidence that intrinsic motivation is often supported by three key factors: autonomy, mastery and purpose. High effort and performance often result from designing jobs to provide freedom of choice, the chance to develop one's skills and expertise and the opportunity to do work that matters. Evidence also supports the importance of a fourth factor: a sense of connection with other people.

Autonomy involves freedom of choice in what to do, when to do it, where to do it and how to do it. Extensive research has shown that when individuals and teams are given autonomy, they experience greater responsibility for their work, invest more time and energy in it, develop more efficient and innovative processes for completing it and ultimately produce higher quality and quantity. For example, in a study at a printing company, Michigan State's Fred Morgeson and colleagues found that when teams lacked clear feedback and information systems, giving them autonomy led them to expend more effort, use more skills and spend more time solving problems. Numerous other studies have shown that allowing employees to exercise choices about goals, tasks, work schedules and work methods can increase their motivation and performance.

Mastery involves the chance to develop specialized knowledge, skills and expertise. Research shows that when employees are given opportunities for mastery, they naturally pursue opportunities to learn and contribute. For instance, research by the University of Sheffield's Toby Wall and colleagues documented the benefits of giving operators of manufacturing equipment the chance to develop the skills to repair machines, rather than waiting for engineers, programmers and supervisors to fix them. The operators took advantage of this opportunity for mastery to create strategies for reducing machine downtime, and worked to learn how to prevent problems in the future. As a result, they were able to complete repairs more quickly and reduce the overall number of repairs.

Purpose involves the experience of contributing to a meaningful effort or cause. Adam Grant (one of the authors of this piece) has shown that when employees meet even a single client, customer or end user who benefits from their work, they gain a clearer understanding of the purpose of their jobs, which motivates them to work harder and smarter. For example, when university fundraisers met a single scholarship student who benefited from the money that they raised, the number of calls they made per hour more than doubled and their weekly revenue jumped by 500%. And when radiologists saw a photo of the patient whose X-ray they were evaluating, they felt more empathy, worked harder and achieved greater diagnostic accuracy. In The India Way, Wharton management professors Peter Cappelli, Harbir Singh, Jitendra Singh (one author of this piece) and Michael Useem observe that Indian companies have found success in motivating employees by cultivating a strong sense of purpose and mission. As Adam Smith, the father of economics, wrote in A Theory of Moral Sentiments: "How selfish soever man may be supposed there are evidently some principles in his nature which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, although he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it."

Connection involves a sense of community, belongingness and being valued by others. Although financial incentives can support connection for star performers, they often impede it for the rest of the organization by creating pay inequality. Studies consistently show that the strongest driver of turnover is not pay, but rather the quality of an employee's relationships with supervisors, co-workers and customers. In a meta-analysis led by Rodger Griffeth of Georgia State University, the quality of relationships with their direct bosses explained more than twice as much variance in employees' decisions to quit as did their objective pay levels or satisfaction with their pay. Even a small but genuine gesture of thanks can help employees feel valued. In a study conducted with Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School, Adam Grant found that the effort of call center employees increased by 51% during the week after an external manager paid them a single visit to express appreciation for their work. In short, relationships matter for retention and motivation.

5. It is very important to decide whether the reward system will be based on performance, seniority or productivity. One concern based on rewarding due to performance is the difficulty of specifying what kind of performance is desired and to determine if it has actually been demonstrated. The figure bellow shows the steps that are necessary in order to implement a successful reward system.

Of course, every supervisor or manager will face challenges when implementing a new reward system into their company. One of the most common mistakes is not implementing the reward system in a way that makes it fair for everyone, including the employees who have been working for years without any incentives. Another mistake is having a strict set in stone way of

quantifying the results. By not having a standard method, it is much easier to make mistakes when determining who should be receiving an award. Some people will be left out; therefore company morale can be hurt. Also, it will start %u201Che got this%u201D %u201Cshe got that%u201D talk with the other employees if the reward system is not consistent with everyone in the company. This causes the sense of teamwork to decrease in the company. Another common mistake is confusing speed with haste. If there is an incentive behind completing a task by a certain date, an employee might try to hurry up just to earn the incentive instead of taking the time to do the work correctly. Lastly, there is a distinct difference between an individual reward and a collective award, or a team reward. A team reward can also affect the sense of teamwork because a member of the team can feel that he or she pulled more weight in the group than another member.

The incentives offered by a business vary depending on the type and size of the company. Someone working for a non-profit company will be offered different incentives than someone working for a for-profit company. The incentives can be just about anything from a monetary reward for hard work, greater visibility within the company, paid vacation time or even lunch with the boss. It all depends on the kind of company one works for.

Non-profit companies tend to not have monetary based incentives. Since non-profit companies by definition are not seeking to make a profit, they offer their workers non-monetary based incentives, like paid vacation time, career development opportunities, and public recognition of success. People work hard, and for people working at a non-profit company know that there is usually not a lot of extra money floating around for large bonuses and salary increases. This being the case, non-profit companies offer their workers

opportunities to travel and vacation time as a way of rewarding employees for a job well done. They will also offer training and career development opportunities to those who wish to further their career, or move up the corporate ladder. Though there may not be a lot of extra cash flow, some non-profit companies will offer small spot bonuses to employees who exceed the expectations of managers.

6. Openness to experience %u2013 (inventive/curious vs. consistent/cautious). Appreciation for art, emotion, adventure, unusual ideas, curiosity, and variety of experience. Openness reflects the degree of intellectual curiosity, creativity and a preference for novelty and variety a person has. It is also described as the extent to which a person is imaginative or independent, and depicts a personal preference for a variety of activities over a strict routine. Some disagreement remains about how to interpret the openness factor, which is sometimes called "intellect" rather than openness to experience.

Conscientiousness %u2013 (efficient/organized vs. easy-going/careless). A tendency to show self-discipline, act dutifully, and aim for achievement; planned rather than spontaneous behavior; organized, and dependable.

Extraversion %u2013 (outgoing/energetic vs. solitary/reserved). Energy, positive emotions, surgency, assertiveness, sociability and the tendency to seek stimulation in the company of others, and talkativeness.

Agreeableness %u2013 (friendly/compassionate vs. cold/unkind). A tendency to be compassionate and cooperative rather than suspicious and antagonistic towards others. It is also a measure of ones' trusting and helpful nature, and whether a person is generally well tempered or not.

Neuroticism %u2013 (sensitive/nervous vs. secure/confident). The tendency to experience unpleasant emotions easily, such as anger, anxiety, depression, or vulnerability. Neuroticism also refers to the degree of emotional stability and impulse control, and is sometimes referred by its low pole %u2013 "emotional stability".

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