Part 1 - Working With Employees: An I/O Commentary on Real World Problems

This required Portfolio assignment will give you experience observing and interacting with people outside of the classroom. It has been designed to provide you with the opportunity to develop skills, synthesize knowledge, and integrate learning in a real world setting. This assignment accomplishes that goal by challenging you to:

Conduct a 30-minute, semi-structured interview with a manager

Identify common challenges and issues that arise in the workplace

Evaluate strategies for addressing these challenges

Integrate your findings with evidence-based literature from journal articles, textbook, and additional scholarly sources.

Objective: This assignment is designed to help you identify common problems that managers face when dealing with employees, and the solutions that managers use in an attempt to solve those problems. This assignment will also give you an opportunity to evaluate the efficacy of the solutions from a practical perspective and from the perspective of research in Industrial/Organizational psychology.

Step 1: Identify someone in your community who is a manager. This should be someone who is responsible for recruiting and/or selecting employees, supervising employees, and evaluating employee performance.

Step 2: Conduct a 30-minute interview with the manager. In your interview, be sure to cover the following questions:

• What are some of the common problems that you have experienced with employees? Be sure to steer the discussion toward relevant topics such as recruitment, employee selection, employee motivation, employee training, job attitudes, giving feedback, creating incentives, managing conflict, and so forth.
• Identify two major problems that the manager mentions and ask how he or she has responded to those problems. What solutions has the manager tried? Have the solutions worked?

Step 3: Using scholarly sources such as your textbook and professional journal articles that you find in the University Library, research the two problems mentioned by the manager. What does the field of I/O say about these types of problems or issues? What recommendations might you make to the manager?

Document your interview and your library research in a 1,050- to 1,600-word paper. Your paper should consist of the following parts:

An introduction, describing the individual that you interviewed and his/her position

A summary of the interview focusing on the two major problems and attempted solutions

A scholarly commentary with recommendations from the perspective of I/O psychology

Part 2 - Read the following scenario:

Woody's Veneer Factory has contacted you because the board wants their organization to be evaluated to determine the reasons for loss of money, increases in garbage fees, and loss of production. The data given to you shows that veneer production is at its lowest point and the cost of recycled material disposal has nearly doubled in the past quarter.

On the day your team went to meet the factory superintendent, Max Barath, you saw one of the floor managers, Dave Flores, outside of Max's office with a bag of ice over his eye. When the team inquired about the injury, Max stated, "It's not a big deal. The quality control officer, Ken Howk, got upset with Dave and got in a little fight. Don't worry about it. These two are old high school chums and this kind of thing happens now and then."

Through several weeks of your assessment, your team has noticed troubling occurrences happening in the factory. The factory managers that are located on the top floor are very abrasive and condescending to the people on the floor. There is a definite 'us versus them' attitude. There is also a lack of communication. Most of the communication is done on a bulletin board out front.

Your team has also noticed that the floor workers are grinding up some of the good veneer. Management believes this is happening, so they are sneaking up in the cat walks to try to catch the floor workers in the act. But the floor workers have placed spies to watch out for the managers, particularly in the administrative areas next to the management offices. Whenever a manager comes out of the office, the administrative staff will call or text down to the floor to let the workers know so they can stop grinding up the good veneer. In addition, several employees on the floor are used as look outs and use hand signals to let everyone know what is going on.

• Provide at least two examples of leadership theories and how to implement them in order to improve the relationship between management and floor workers.

Be sure to include at least seven scholarly references in your paper for both sections.

Format your paper according to APA guidelines.