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 1200 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

Be sure to include at least five scholarly references in your paper. Provide a list your specific interview questions as an Appendix. Format your paper according to APA guidelines.