Full name: Vu Duc Thinh

Student ID: 21117023 – MBA06

Course: Organizational Behavior

FINAL ASSIGNMENT

1. What do you see as the main problem facing S&K, and which factors have
caused it?
The main problem facing S&K educational institutions is the fall in their
competitive advantage and financial burden, which is caused by their lack of employee
motivation, organizational fairness, and weak leadership. From the beginning of the
establishment in the middle of the 1990s, S&K has rapidly developed with large
amounts of branches and employees across the country thanks to flexible policies that
allow its staff to earn more revenue in association with other institutions and the saving
from employees’ wage for investment into opening branches across the country. These
all had changed due to the rigorous demands of the educational sector and the taking
over of the new manager – Peter. The S&K’s leader decided to prioritize improving the
quality of their institution’s education by establishing more new branches, and by
changing the academic staff’s performance appraisal criteria. This policy would require
employees with significantly more work, which doesn’t allow academic staff to work
with other educational institutions to make up their income. By paying academic staff
less than their peers at other institutions and doing nothing to make up for the low salary,
S&K had created a sense of injustice and unhappiness among their staff. Even more so,
senior management has been largely uninterested in addressing the concerns of
academic personnel, as he acknowledged the existence of a pay disparity with the
explanation, that S&K focuses more on investment in the physical environment. This
has shown poor leadership skills as the senior manager focuses only on business growth
instead of human resources motivation and organizational fairness. Therefore, S&K
stepped into a crisis as they eventually found it facing a deterioration in both its teaching
and its research standards.

2. Analyze S&K’s current situation using expectancy theory.

The expectancy theory proposed by Victor Vroom contains three parts:
expectancy, instrumentality, and valence. According to this theory, employees will be
motivated to exert a high level of effort when they believe that it will lead to a good
performance appraisal, that appraisal will lead to organizational rewards, and that
reward will satisfy their personal goals. In applying the expectancy theory to the case of
the S&K institution, we noticed the effort-performance relationship in the period of
S&K establishment. For the first decade of operation, the academic staff at S&K had
great expectations for its future success, believing that it would lead to business growth
and an encouraging rise in their salaries. As the result, they accept wages that were lower
than those offered by rival institutions. In the second decade of operation, management
Full name: Vu Duc Thinh
Student ID: 21117023 – MBA06

(especially Peter) strove to improve S&K’s academic performance through a

punishment-reward system, regardless of any adjustments in the normal pay
arrangements. This system determined academic staff would have put in more effort to
meet the new performance requirements, but this extra work was unlikely to pay off
financially due to the increase in investment in the physical environment and the extra
costs of establishing new branches of S&K. As the result, this led to the conflict in
rewards-personal goals relationship. According to the theory of anticipation, the
motivational value of potential rewards is dwarfed by the time and effort required to
earn them, especially when punishment is involved. As a manager, Peter kept the
promise to his academic staff but the wage was insignificantly increased, the reward
does not satisfy employees’ personal goals and needs, as well as have no attractiveness
to the staff, who already has lower pay compared to their peer from other educational
institution. Consequently, the academic staff declined executive job offers and refused
to provide the institution with organizational and managerial support. And worse, some
of them simply quit job at S&K and join rival institutions leads to the crisis of S&K.

3. Analyze S&K’s current situation using equity theory.

Any individual at work has a driving force behind them, whether it is money, status,
or a desire to achieve well at work, this incentive can be both external and internal
(McShane et al., 2015). According to the equity theory, employees evaluate what they
get from their job, such as money, promotions, and recognition, to what they put into it,
such as effort, experience, and education. These individuals compare the ratio of their
output to their input to that of others... Additionally, individuals who identify an
unfairness between themselves and their peers will change their job to make the matter
fair in their own eyes. And so, employees are motivated by organizational justice.
Although academic personnel at S&K from the beginning were given low compensation,
they were permitted to work with other institutions, which allowed them to earn
additional revenue. At this time, S&K’s academic staff felt fair and equitable as they
can make enough income equaled with their peer from others institutions, as well as
recognition of the management board to their effort of contributing to the institution’s
academic and business growth. But, in the second decade of the institution’s operation,
Peter strengthened the standards for performance appraisal but insignificantly increase
the academic personnel’s compensation. Moreover, the rigidity in the performance-
reward relationship had made the academic staff at S&K put significantly more effort
focusing on enhancing the institution’s teaching and research standards. In addition,
employees’ reactions to what they saw to be unfair working conditions were muted. As
the result, S&K’s staff compared the ratio of their outcomes to their input with their
peers at other institutions and felt unsatisfied. And so their perception is inequity and
unfairness in the working environment due to being under-rewarded. Consequently, the
academic staff turned down executive job offers and refused to provide organizational
and management assistance to the school.
Full name: Vu Duc Thinh
Student ID: 21117023 – MBA06

4. In your opinion, what measures can S&K take to motivate its academic staff?
S&K’s academic staff could be motivated in a variety of ways. These include: flex-
time management; lowering the penalty for failing to meet the unique performance
standards; and S&K’s academic staff members’ base salaries should be on par with their
peers at similar institutions, following the revised performance standards. Due to the
current situation of the fall in business and the increase of competitors, S&K is not
capable of boosting employees’ compensation. If so, in the way to motivate academic
staff, S&K can loosen the new requirements for full-time office presence so their staff
can cooperate with other institutions on a part-time basis in order to earn some more
revenue. A good idea to go with this flex-time working policy is a job-sharing
arrangement, which allows two or more individuals to split a traditional full-time job.
One full-time job with two or more participants sharing can be less expensive in terms
of salary and benefit than one full-timer. This can also be beneficial with the
performance-reward relationship of S&K to motivate their staff. This is because, while
academic staff at S&K are still able to earn some more revenue with collaboration with
outsiders but still be able to finish the job to meet the high standards of the institution.
In addition, lowering the penalty for failing with verbal persuasion from the head
manager can may increase motivation to work of staff at S&K. This is because,
according to the self-efficacy theory (Robbins, 2018), S&K’s staff would be more
confident when their manager convinces them that they have the skills necessary to be
successful. In conclusion, by taking these simple measures, S&K can motivate its
academic staff.

5. If you were an academic staff member of S&K, what would you do?
As S&K is currently facing issues such as decreasing enrollment and increased
competition, possible actions that I would engage in remaining with S&K as I believe
in the leadership of Tom instead of Peter from the second decade of operation led to
S&K’s fall. In Tom, I see the ability to influence academic staff at S&K toward a goal
of overcoming the crisis. Although Tom was being honest that it would not be possible
to increase the salaries of the staff, still the staff was expected to put his or her every
effort into tackling the current crisis by emphasizing the importance of academic staff
in S&K’s general problem-solving processes. This would give Tom’s subordinates share
a significant degree of decision-making power and the satisfaction of being valued and
rewarded when overcoming the crisis. This raises the belief in the leadership skill Tom,
as well as the involvement and contribution of its academic staff, not to create
redundancies, but to bring back the S&K institution with teaching and research standards
that meet the overall needs of the educational market.
Full name: Vu Duc Thinh
Student ID: 21117023 – MBA06

Reference:

McShane, S., Olekalns, M., Newman, A., & Travaglione, T. (2015). Organisational Behaviour 5e;
Emerging Knowledge. Global Insights. McGraw-Hill Education Australia.
Robbins, S. P. (2018). Organizational behavior.