Expert answer:Summary of Textbook Case Profiles
Expert answer:Start familiarizing yourself with the “Role Profiles for the Cases”, which is located at the back of your textbook before the Index. While we won’t complete the case provided for every chapter, we will use quite a few of them. Sometimes your responses to the cases will be individual and sometimes you will be placed into groups and each of you will be assigned one of these roles. It is very important to understand the perspective that each of these roles would have in a scenario.To show me your understanding, please summarize those pages of the role profiles for the company and each employee into a one page Word document and submit to this dropbox.
340_case.docx
chapter_1___the_nature_of_conflict.pptx
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The Conflict Survival Kit provides
profiles featured in the cases at the end
of each chapter. The main character is
Joe Newcomer, who is an assistant
manager with More Power, Inc.
Identifying with Joe and the other
charac- ters will help make the cases
and role plays more realistic and
enjoyable. If you have the opportunity to
play a role in a group situation, you will
be expected to make decisions from the
viewpoint of the character you portray. For example, if you are given the
role of Joe, you should act in a way you
believe an individual like Joe would act
when addressing a particular conflict
situation. In addition to traditional
characters employed in a hypothetical
organization, a few additional
characters act in the role of experts,
such as Joe’s boss and his evening
class professor. Further, characters
include at least one customer and a
vendor who do business with More
Power. Every attempt has been made to
broaden the types of conflicts a
supervisor might face in a typical day.
The Company: more power, InC. More
Power, Inc., is a large, local retail store
specializing in the sale and service of
hardware, tools, lawn and garden
implements, and other materi- als for
the home. More Power operates seven
days a week, dawn to dusk.
Approximately 120 employees work in
distinct divisions within the store,
including customer service/return desk;
warehouse and delivery; service and
repair; and three distinct sections
focused on (1) hardware and tools, (2)
lawn and garden and outdoors, and (3)
home building and improve- ment. Five
assistant managers who oversee these
divisions report to the owner/manager.
The organizational chart of More Power,
Inc., includes the employees who are
featured in the case studies. Joe
newComer, assIsTanT manager,
warehouse, DelIvery, anD CusTomer
servICe As Joe, you are the key figure in
most of the case studies. You are an
assis- tant manager and have been
working for More Power, Inc., for four
months. In your role, you are
responsible for overseeing the
customer service/return desk and for
managing the warehouse and delivery
functions. You manage approximately
thirty people. You are twenty-six and
married, with a two-year-old daughter.
Your wife is pregnant and works full
time as an office manager. Although
your current
position is not perfect, you thought it was
the appropriate progression in your career
as a manager. In addition, when you
accepted the position, you under- stood
that you would have flexibility to pursue
other goals. Specifically, you expected the
job would allow you to return to night
school to work toward earning a four-year
degree, adding to your two-year associate
degree. The position offered more money
and better benefits, which is more
important than ever now that you and your
wife have a child with another on the way.
Now that you are enrolled in night school, it
has been difficult balancing school with
work and family obligations. Although your
boss, Jim Talent, is generally
understanding about your need to leave
early in the evening to attend school, you
have been expected occasionally to stay
later and either arrive late or miss class
altogether. At home, you are not always fun
to be around because you often have to
study instead of spend time with your wife
and daughter. It has been especially
difficult to balance all these obligations
because of the stresses and challenges you
face on a daily basis at work. You are
expected to address and resolve
innumerable employee, customer, and
vendor problems every day. You are not
always sure whether you have made the
right career choice by accepting your
current position. You are not always sure
you have the skills to handle some of these
trying conflicts.
As Jim Talent, you grew up in the hardware, lawn, and
garden business. You worked with your father, who
started the business, until he retired. You have
worked in virtually every imaginable position in the
store and
know the business inside and out. You
are forty-one, married, and have two teenaged
children. Although you have a four-year degree,
which you earned the hard way through years of
night school while working full time, you believe your
management expertise and leadership style were
developed more through the day-to-day grind of
work than through formal education. You are a
straightforward, direct individual who prefers
deliberate action to deep analysis and talk. You can
be patient with the assistant managers you supervise
and are willing to coach them on how to perform their
jobs and become effective managers. However, you
prefer that they make deci- sions on their own, take
ownership for those decisions (good or bad), and not
always depend on you to bail them out. Your reason
for this approach is a matter of both personal
management style and practicality. With so many
employees to manage and areas of responsibility to
oversee, you rely on your as resourceful and toughminded as you are. When you hired Joe, you thought
he had a lot of promise. Though Joe seems insecure
in his role, he is also task oriented and sincere about
being an effective manager. You can tell he cares
about his customers and the people he manages, but
he often spends too much time deliberating over how
to handle difficult situations. You would rather that
he jump in headfirst to confront matters, as you
would. He could also use a little more experience in
delegating. While you support his aspirations for
school, you believe all that “head knowledge” is no
replacement for the hard knocks Joe needs to be
successful. To that end, you believe you can provide
a good balance to his college experience as a realworld coach.
As Fred Staid, you are comfortable working as the
team leader in the delivery section. You oversee the
logistics of delivery; arrange deliveries; and direct a
small fleet of drivers, loaders, and installers. You
know this end of the business well as you have been
in this role, in this store, for as long as anyone can
remember. You enjoy the security of the position,
being the resident authority over a particular area
and having a job you can leave at the end of the day
without thinking about it. This security is especially
important right now. You are fifty-two, married, with
three kids, two in high school and one in college.
Your kids are hard working, as they must be. You are
encouraging them to seek the opportunities you
never had, such as going to college, but are unable to
support them finan- cially in these goals. You enjoy
spending time with your wife, attending your teens’
football games and band concerts, and fussing with
the lawn. You are a conservative individual and not
comfortable with rapid organizational change. You
are analytical and good at organization and planning.
You don’t like making changes rapidly but prefer to
think things through and move slowly. While you
realize others may have input in how things should
be run in your area, you are somewhat reticent to
relinquish even the least amount of control to others.
As Sally Ambitious, though you like your job, you
have no desire to remain in your position as
warehouse team leader forever. In fact, you would
like to move up to an assistant manager position
eventually, though this may take longer than it would
others since you have only a high school diploma. At
twenty-two, you have plenty of time. You want to
attend college but cur- rently are focused on raising
two young children. Moving into an assistant
manager position might also require accepting a
position with another com- pany in another state,
something you are not prepared to do. Your husband
recently started a new position so moving right now
would not make sense. You are making the most of
your current role. You like the idea that More Power
management, including both Jim Talent and Joe
Newcomer, have given you a great deal of leeway in
directing day-to-day warehouse operations. In the
year that you have held this position, you believe you
have streamlined functions so that products are
more effectively inventoried and shelved and that
depleted products are replenished more quickly. You
also believe that the processes you have
implemented have ensured that customers receive
ordered products in a prompt manner, either through
in-store pickup at the customer service desk or
through coordination with Fred’s delivery section.
However, you still see ways in which functions
between your section and Fred’s may be more
efficiently coordinated. You are an expressive,
creative individual with more ideas than you have
time to implement. You tend toward impatience. You
are prone to making quick decisions, but this is
because you are more intuitive than analytical about
the best way to proceed on projects. Often, your
intuition has led to innovative and successful results.
On the law of averages, your approach has proven no
less effective than the slower, more deliberate
approach others might prefer.
As Tina Tumultuous, you have a mixed employment
record as a customer service representative. When
you started working with More Power five years ago,
you loved the work and you were quite good at it. You
know the retail business and can recite chapter and
verse of More Power’s poli- cies and procedures on
returns, refunds, and damaged items. You know a
great deal about the products More Power sells,
where they are located in the store, and where to
direct customers to find items or to seek further
assistance. You have generally treated customers in
a respectful manner. In fact, because of your
knowledge and work with customers, you were
named Employee of the Month a couple of times in
the past few years. But your attitude has changed
recently. You are as capable as you ever were, and if
asked, you would acknowledge that you are still
com- mitted to your job and to helping make More
Power successful. But your personal life is in turmoil.
You went through a difficult divorce. You have two
kids, one in junior high and the other in high school.
Your older child, a son, has been in and out of trouble
in school and with the law.
Lately, Jim and Joe have talked with you
repeatedly about your behavior and
interaction with customers. They have used
words such as “curt,” “bossy,” “loud,”
“rude,” and “insensitive” in counseling you
about customer interactions they have
observed. On occasion, you have been disciplined for these behaviors. The stress and
anxiety you have been feeling regarding
your personal life may account for why you
have been acting this way. However, you
are reluctant to discuss these issues with
management. proFessor TImoThy JusTICe,
ph.D. As Professor Justice, you are Joe’s
professor for Managing Conflict in Work
and Life, an elective that Joe is taking
toward a degree in management and
supervision. You are also Joe’s academic
advisor. You are rumpled and gray-haired,
with a generous spirit and a passion for
teaching. You once worked in an industrial
environment but returned to school and
earned a Ph.D. in industrial and labor
relations. You have been a professor for
twenty years and would not think of
returning to a position in industry. However,
you do serve as an independent consultant
for various compa- nies, and you also enjoy
helping to equip future leaders like Joe to
succeed in their roles as managers. You
like Joe. You find that he has a lot of
intellectual curiosity about the theories of
management as well as conflict and
negotiation. You find, though, that Joe is
having a difficult time applying what he is
learning in the classroom to the real-world
situations he faces at More Power. You
teach collaborative and empowerment
models of management and con- flict
intervention and insist that your students
get a good grasp of these theories and
concepts to apply them in their jobs. You
also try hard to balance theory with
practical, albeit hypothetical, case studies,
exercises, and other applications to give
students a picture of how these theories
and concepts work on the job. With Joe,
you are more than happy to teach him, to
listen to his frustrations in dealing with
conflicts at work, and to offer advice when
you can. vIC venDor, sales represenTaTIve,
Do or Dye Tools, InC. As Vic Vendor, you are
the regional sales representative for Do or
Dye Tools, Inc., which has a long-standing
relationship with More Power as one of Do
or Dye’s largest distributors. You have
worked for Do or Dye Tools only a few
months, having replaced the former sales
representative to More Power, Axel Rod,
who had served in that role for almost
twenty years. You are young, but you have
a good sales record from previous sales
positions.
Since you are new to your role and are
replacing someone who had a trusted
relationship with More Power management,
you are careful at first to respect that
relationship and the “gentlemen’s
agreements” between Axel Rod and More
Power. However, you are slowly realizing
that your pre- decessor engaged in all sorts
of unsound business practices, such as
giving large volume discounts on tools;
refunding More Power for defective tools
“no questions asked”; and agreeing to
endless rebates, “freebies,” give- aways,
and other deals that drastically affected Do
or Dye’s profit margin. You think that Do or
Dye has been taken advantage of, thanks to
Axel Rod’s “old boy” approach. You want to
base the relationship on a pricing structure
that has some reasonable basis in valuing
Do or Dye’s manufac- turing and delivery
costs, other overhead, expectation for
realizing a profit, and similar
considerations. You are prepared to
introduce a new pricing structure but know
this will not be received well by More Power
managers. As Maria Service, you are a
professional woman who works as a real
estate account manager at a major bank.
You and your husband own a home and
shop at More Power as your preferred
retailer for tools and lawn and garden and
home improvement needs. You have
generally been pleased with the prices and
customer service at More Power. However,
you occa- sionally shop at More Power’s
competitors in town. Service is not quite as
good, and prices are generally just a little
higher. At times, you have had to return a
product to More Power, either because you
realized you did not need it after all or
because of a slight defect. Returns have
generally been honored. In your daily
interactions with others, you are generally
pleasant, but you are also confident and
willing to press your position if you believe
you are not being treated fairly. This has
not always been easy for you. You are a
second-generation Latina American. Your
family immigrated to the United States
from Mexico when you were a child. You
are well aware of the struggles your family
and others in the Latino community must
endure to earn fairness and respect in the
community and in business affairs. Your
family is proud of you for having earned a
bachelor’s degree and an MBA. Your
husband owns a management consultant
firm.
As Kim Khan, you have been the assistant
manager in the hardware and tools section
for three years. You worked for More Power
in previous positions, resigned to work in
the construction industry as a carpenter,
and then returned. You are an expert with
tools, and you love sharing your expertise
with customers. In fact, in addition to
working with customers to select the best
tools for their projects, you offer free
weekend classes on how to use tools and
how to do various construction projects.
You are more effective at working with
customers than you are in managing sales
or people. You will spend hours working
with customers and are not prone to use
sales tactics to encourage customers to
buy tools. You have developed a loyal
customer base among a small group of
cus- tomers. As a manager, your
employees are often frustrated. As the
expert, you spend time with customers and,
therefore, do not train employees as you
should or give them enough opportunities
to interact with customers.
Employees have complained that you tend
to assign menial tasks to them and keep all
the interesting work to yourself. You are not
sure how you feel about working with Joe.
There is a lot of interaction between you
and Joe, as you rely on his area to keep
inventory up; handle customer ordering;
and work with customers regard- ing
complaints, returns, and other matters.
Often, Joe has to come to you with
questions. You are a skilled tradesperson
by training, not a college graduate. Joe
seems to do okay with management issues
but lacks the expertise you think is needed
to effectively handle More Power’s
products and services. It irritates you that
he has to come to you so often with questions and seems to do the same with Jim
Talent. “Either you can do a job or you
can’t,” you say to yourself. “If you can’t,
then move on.” Jim is appar- ently
oblivious to this. anTon Knox, a.K.a. “mr.
opporTunITy,” DelIvery Team worKer As
Anton Knox, you are young and
irresponsible. You do not take your work
seriously. On your best days, you are an
average performer. On such days, you
usually come to work on time and put in the
minimally required effort to keep your job.
On your worst days, you are late to work
and do not pay careful attention to the work
you are doing. You tend to sit around and
wait for Fred Staid to give you your next
assignment. You like to joke around with
the other guys on the delivery team. You
are called “Mr. Opportunity” because you
never miss an oppor- tunity to get around
doing your work. You also never seem to
miss the opportunity to call in sick or come
in late. When Fred talks with you about
these issues, you find his comments to be
outrageous and demeaning. He apparently
does not understand all the personal issues
surrounding your life that give you
legitimate reasons for the behaviors for
which you are accused. Nobody seems to
have all the troubles that you do because if
they did, they would understand. The way
you feel treated at work is enough at times
to make you angry. Yet you generally avoid
outbursts. You just complain a lot. You also
know the store’s policies on sick leave and
tardiness and are a mas- ter at improving
your performance at the point when
discipline might be imposed. You have
learned to work around Fred and convince
him that you will improve your
performance. You are grateful that you are
not on Joe’s radar—for now. TamIKo TImID,
DelIvery Team worKer As Tamiko Timid,
you come to work every day and do your
job. You are a consistent, average
performer. You are one of only two females
on the delivery team. The men on the team
like to joke around, which at times makes
you uncomfortable. Yet you do not
complain about this. You are not overly
excited about working with Fred Staid,
though you acknowledge that he knows the
business of retail delivery. You respect his
authority and always respond to his
requests. You wish that others on the team
would do the same. You have not formed
many relationships among your coworkers.
You are not comfortable with chitchat and
want to simply put in an honest day’s work
and go home. You do not like
complications in your life, nor do you want
to form complicated relationships at work.
You also worry a lot about losing your job.
There is one person you admire: Sally
Ambitious. You have occa- sionally had
lunch with her. She has tried to encourage
you to be more confident. She has
especially encouraged you to be more
assertive about matters that concern you
and to communicate your concerns to Fred
or others.
The Nature of Conflict 1
Conflict Survival Kit
Second edition
Griffith & Goodwin
Class Name
Instructor Name
Date, Semester
Performance Competencies
After you have finished reading this chapter, you
will be able to:
•
•
•
•
Describe the general nature of conflict
Describe the costs of unresolved conflicts in
organizations and among individu …
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