OGL 481 Pro-Seminar I:

PCA-Choosing an Organization Worksheet

Worksheet Objectives:
1. Identify an organization and situation you want to study over the remainder of the course.
2. Describe the organization and the situation

Complete the following making sure to support your ideas and cite from the textbook and other
course materials per APA guidelines. After the peer review, you have a chance to update this and
format for your Electronic Portfolio due in Module 6.

1) Name and describe your organization.

The organization I am going to talk about today is a company that specializes in hosted
telephony solutions. Or in other words, this company hosts servers that had virtual phone
numbers that customer could pay for, and these servers allowed companies to present like
they had paid money to have equipment installed with tools like voicemail or dial by
name menu options. We will call this company Messaging Services. This organization is
a very small organization with no more than six employees at any given time. As such a
small team each employee was expected to perform many tasks to accommodate different
roles as necessary. Often the small size of the team led people to feel like they were a part
of a family unit rather than a work unit.

2) Describe your role in the organization (it can be an internal or external role).

My role in the organization was defined as a Customer Support Representative. For

several years I was one of two employees that was dedicated to supporting the
organization. While in this position, I was asked to provide technical assistance akin to
what technical support representative would provide. I was asked to provide this to both
internal team members and external customers. I was also asked to learn how to install
and operate VoIP telephone equipment and systems. And I was asked to write and
publish blog posts complete with linked key words even though I had no experience with
blogs, either reading or writing. About six months before I left the organization, the other
Customer Support Representative was asked to leave the organization under unclear
terms. This left me as the only Customer Support Representative. This meant that all of
the tasks we were collectively responsible for became my tasks by default.

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 3) Describe the situation, including information you think the will help the reader
understand the most important elements of the situation. (This will require
selectivity: part of the art of case writing is separating the essential facts from the
mass of information that might be inclcuded).

The situation I am going to talk about happened about 6 months after the second
customer support representative was dismissed. There was a lot of animosity between the
owner of the company and the support team and after the second support team member
was asked to leave the company, this animosity became much more focused on me since
the two of us were friends outside of the job. I opted to take her side in the
unemployment hearing to provide witness to the behavioral and environmental
circumstances of the organization. This led to other employees retaliating and spreading
false statements about both the terminated employee and myself. I was six months
pregnant in a high-risk pregnancy due to previous health issues and all this added
animosity was causing me to suffer from hypertension. It got to the point where I felt he
was intentionally being toxic and was trying to run me out of the company, even going so
far as storming into my office daily to yell at me. When he forbade me from going to the
doctor for my scheduled prenatal checkup, I broke down and verbally retaliated. This led
to a suspension for insubordination.