June 2009

Essay Questions
Essay 1

As part of your completion of an annual appraisal exercise with your team you identify that two of your staff have
very different personalities that impact on how they believe that they can manage their careers in the
organisation. One has the view that there is nothing that can be done at the individual level whereas the other
feels that their future is in their own hands. Based on your understanding of OB concepts, how would you manage
these two staff members differently to ensure that their future careers are maximised to the benefit of the
organisation?

(60 marks)

 Examiner's Solution
 Selected Student Answer

 The question is indicating that the two employees have a different locus of control. The individual who
believes that nothing can be done at an individual level is clearly at the extreme end being an externaliser.
The other, who sees that their life and career are in their own hands, is an internaliser.

 Externalisers would tend to believe that rewards being allocated by the organisation are more to do with
being in the right job and place in the organisation rather than being linked to individual performance or
contribution to organisational objectives. In addition, they believe that in performance appraisal, managers
have favourites to whom they give higher assessments, again not linked to “real” performance or
contribution. These are the people who believe that anyone can become an addict to drugs or alcohol and
that other people’s attitudes cannot be changed through logical discussion.

 Internalisers believe that reward is an expected outcome resulting from hard work, achievement and as a
result of taking initiative. They further see that a good performance appraisal results from hard work and
positive contribution to the organisation. They believe that addiction is a result of individuals giving up
control and that logic can change attitudes in others.

 Locus of control is an important component of personality that makes individuals unique, alongside
extroversion v introversion, Machiavellianism and socially acquired needs. Personality is linked to the
behaviours that individuals display at work and it is these behaviours that ultimately impact upon
organisational performance. While personality is difficult to change, organisational systems can impact of
what is perceived as acceptable behaviour that links to successful outcomes.

 Good student answers should bring in examples from business to demonstrate their understanding of the
above.

 Other individual differences may well interact with locus of control to make managing a more challenging
task. These would include extroversion/introversion, need for power, affiliation or achievement, type A
behaviour, Machiavellianism and experience levels.
Essay 2

Your organisation has just posted the worst annual report in its history, including the largest loss overall. Your CEO
has been quoted in the press saying that as a direct result of this loss the company will enter into a period of
reorganisation to ensure that savings can be made to help to address the issue. What organisational design
concepts would help the CEO to do what he says?

(60 marks)

 Organisational Design consists of four key elements: division of labour, delegation of authority,
departmentalisation and span of control. In addition, in the case outlined, the concepts of downsizing and
delayering should be discussed.
 Downsizing is about reducing the size of the workforce and thus introducing lower costs of operating the
organisation. In any downsizing programme there will be increased stress levels for all involved, whether
they be managers implementing such a change, survivors in the organisation dealing with changing
workloads or people being made redundant from the organisation. To be effective, any downsizing
programme has to be managed using planned change processes like those in the text from Lewin and the
expansion of his ideas provided by Dailey.

 Delayering by reducing or eliminating layers of middle managers adds to the effect of downsizing by
reducing management costs. In addition, however, this impacts directly on delegation of authority and
division of labour. It may well be necessary for the organisation to complete job redesign work to cater for
the changing responsibilities of those managers and staff left after delayering has taken place. This would
be an appropriate time to think about introducing Self-Directed Teams to take over some of the decision-
making previously completed by managers.

 In terms of departmentalisation, this may be an appropriate time for the organisation to consider changing
current structures to become more customer responsive, thus pushing decision-making closer to the
customer interface. This could involve the organisation moving away from traditional functionally based
departments to either focus on territories, products or using matrix management or project management
techniques more widely.

 With fewer managers through delayering, there will be a need to address span of control, the numbers of
reports that managers manage. Tied in with delayering, spans of control will rise but the managers job
would change from being a traditional command and control function towards being more facilitative of
ensuring that SDTs are effective horizontally across the organisation.

 Key to these changes being effective is planned change management while taking account of possible
major changes in organisational culture.

 Lewin’s change model of unfreezing, change and refreezing has been expanded by Dailey to include an
initial phase in which the need for change is recognised throughout the organisation. It will not be enough,
therefore, for the CEO to have announced in the press that the reported loss will lead to reorganisation. It
is in this stage that the CEO has to get buy in to the change from all involved and this would include
offering a vision of what the organisation will look like once change has been completed. There may need,
additionally, to be further diagnostic work completed to define the full extent and impact of the changes to
be made. Through that diagnostic work it is then possible to identify where likely resistance to change will
arise and to start to manage that resistance so that it does not become a barrier to the changes being
achieved. Selection of change methods to be used would come next in the process and in this case it is
most likely that a team based approach would be most effective, especially if the organisation is going
ahead with introducing SDTs. Implementation, perhaps in a phased fashion to allow learning and rework,
would come next alongside evaluating the impact of the changes implemented to ensure that the planned
 results are delivered and unexpected negative results are avoided. The final two stages of the change
process would include institutionalising the changes so they become part of the day-to-day ways of
working and for them to be diffused across the whole organisation.

 All of the above is describing a potential, major change in the culture of the organisation, and while the
change process described will help to manage the transition to the new culture, managers need to ensure
that systems are in place to ensure consistency of approach. For example, a move to SDTs would require
the organisation to put in place reward processes to ensure that team as well as individual reward is in
place to recognise high performance. It may well be necessary to put intensive training in place to assist
managers to understand their changed role in a downsized and delayered organisation. Training would also
be necessary for members of SDTs to understand their roles, responsibilities and new ways of working.

 Good student answers should bring in examples from business to demonstrate their understanding of the
above.

Essay 3

You have been appointed to a programme management job in your organisation, overseeing a number of project
teams each led by a different project manager. As part of the job handover by the previous programme manager,
you have been advised that it appears that a number of the project teams are not operating to their full potential.
What team issues would you want to explore in trying to help the project managers to create and maintain high
performance teams?

(60 marks)

The key team issues that could be examined centre on team development stages, the readiness of individual team
members to contribute to effective team working and the appropriateness of the leadership style being adopted by
the various project managers.

On team development stages, it would be worth completing some diagnostic work to identify where the teams
currently stand. Those teams at the performing stage are likely to be the high quality teams while others that have
got stuck at either the forming, storming or norming stages are likely to be under-delivering on their potential. It
is also possible that some longer term teams have entered into the adjourning or mourning phase, with
consequent process losses in team interactions.

The underperforming teams may also have entered into groupthink. Some discussion of how this might be
overcome is, therefore, appropriate.

Especially if the teams are operating, the psychological readiness of team members to commit to team goals and
processes may be an issue.

Finally, are the project managers delivering an appropriate style of leadership for the individual teams, their stage
of development and that fits the personal style on beliefs of the manager? Those teams that are lower down the
stages of team development are likely to need much more in terms of being told by the manager while gradually
as the team develops the leaders should be moving much more to delegation of decision making to the team. A
key question here would be whether the manager himself/herself needs personal development to be more able to
deliver an appropriate leadership style.

In trying to address the problems of teams that are stuck at a level below ‘performing’ it may be possible for the
programme manager to intervene and initiate team development activities to move the team forward. Taking the
team away from the working environment for a day of team building would allow them to refocus on the team
objectives, identify appropriate norms to deliver those objectives and re-emphasise openness in communication
within the team that will all lead the team towards higher performance levels.
In terms of leadership development, if the organisation takes a trait approach to the subject it may be necessary
to remove project managers showing a lack of skills. If the organisation takes more of a process view of
leadership, however, then a training and development approach may deliver behavioural change that would lead
to higher performance.

Good student answers should bring in examples from business to demonstrate their understanding of the above.