B325_MTA_Instructions_Fall 2016
Chapter 1
Q: Define collaborative advantage and collaborative inertia?
Collaborative Advantage: is when collaboration between several bodies (industries, agencies, governmental bodies, etc.) allows to achieve efficiency, growth, progress, etc. reference their alliance (5 Marks).
Collaborative Inertia: is when collaboration between two or more entities induces a slow progress without achieving any tangible outcome (5 Marks).
Q: Explain the six bases of collaborative advantage as presented in the course material? Or = Q: Identify and discuss the bases for collaborative advantage. Support your answer with examples?
1) Access to Resources: Organizations often collaborate if they are unable to achieve their objectives with their own resources. Sometimes this means pooling financial or human resources, but more often it allows to bring together different resources including technology or expertise. For example (1): inter-Company collaboration over taking a product to the market è One company provides the product and the other provides the access to the market.
And examples of types of industries that choose this type of collaboration such as:
a) Very small entrepreneurial businesses.
b) Large companies such as pharmaceutical industry (where both activities – marketing and production are complex)
c) Companies seeking new markets in new geographical areas
For example (2):Collaborations involving organizations in the non-profit and public sectors as to share resource, expertise, knowledge and connections. Such as, the police, legal professions, probation services, schools and neighborhood and youth groups collaborate over youth criminal justice issues.
2) Shared Risk: Organizations collaborate because the consequences of failure on a project are too high for them to risk taking it on alone so They share the risk. For example: Collaboration between cost-intensive research and development organizations.
3) Efficiency: Governments have often seen private organizations as being more efficient than public ones, and so he latter has promoted public-private partnerships (collaboration). Four different perspectives on efficiency:
a) Efficiency stems from the notion of economies of scale
b) Efficiency related to outsourcing activities (example: companies may outsource support activities such as cleaning and catering to other companies who can gain economies of scale)
c) Operational efficiency: many purchasing and supply chain alliances are of this sort. Purchasing companies gain efficiencies by ensuring that the delivery of product is done on time and as per the agreed price. Supplying organizations gain efficiencies by having a relatively predictable market.
d) Coordination of public service delivery to avoid duplication in service provision and thus ensure efficiency.
4) Co-ordination and Seamlessness: coordination is an important element to achieve efficiency. Coordination: is the act of organizing, making different people or things work together for a goal or effect to fulfill desired goals in an organization.
Coordination is a managerial function in which different activities of the business are properly adjusted and interlinked.
and coordination is not always concerned with seamlessness: -
• Repetition (duplication of an activity)
• Omission (leaving gaps in activity)
• Divergence (diluting activity across a range of activities)
• Counter production (pursuing conflicting activities) are pitfalls obstructing collaboration.
5) Learning: while collaborations are set up to pursue some joint activity, some are created with the aim of mutual learning. For example: staff from automobile industry acting as trainers for their suppliers of components/parts
6) Moral Imperative: the most important reason for being concerned in collaboration is a moral one.
• Issues facing society (such as crime, drug, poverty, conflict, health promotion, economic development, etc.) cannot be tackled by any organization acting alone.
• Collaboration is essential to alleviate any problems at the organization, industry, society and national levels.
Chapter 2
Q: Identify, define and critically discuss in detail the two types of goals. Support your answer with examples?
1) Superordinate Goal: a superordinate goal is like a “slogan” to induce/encourage people, to translate a message to people
• “A Superordinate goal captures “the heart”. It focuses mainly on affect; it appeals to emotion.
• A Superordinate goal is a bottom-up goal. Bottom-Up goals are more powerful than Top-Down goal since they are expressed in the language of the employees.
Three questions allow the development of Bottom-Up Superordinate goals:
1- Why do we exist as a unit?
2- Who should miss us if we are gone?
3- What is our primary source of discontent?
Examples of Superordinate Goal:
• “I have a dream” – Martin Luther King;
• “The just society” – Prime Minister of Canada, Pierre Trudeau;
• Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country” – John F. Kennedy
• “Learning through entertainment” – Walt Disney
2) Goal setting (SMART goal): goal setting is a cognitive variable (i.e. based on understanding, knowledge, observation, reasoning), whereas Superordinate goal aims only to affect.
• Goal setting is the manifestation of needs and values.
• The purpose of goal setting is to make the Superordinate goal concrete, to move it from emotional to concrete action steps.
• To achieve that goal must be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and have a Time-frame.
• In other words, we need to have a SMART goal as to transfer a “Superordinate goal” into a “concrete goal”.
Example: Walt Disney
• Superordinate goal: “Learning through entertainment”
• SMART goal: Putting in place the Epcot center that allows people to be more knowledgeable and wiser after passing a day at the center than they were in the morning when they came.
Q: Identify and discuss in detail the three characteristics needed to ensure a good goal setting?
Managers need three characteristics to ensure a good goal setting which are: -
1- Integrity: -
• Commitment to Superordinate and SMART goals is a must.
• Managers need to make sure that what they are saying is in line with the pre-set goals (Superordinate and SMART goals).
• They need to pay extreme attention to the signals that they send unconsciously.
• Leaders need to set learning goals to make people comfortable.
• Informal channels are seen in general better than formal channel as to the achievement of goals (discussion with employees over coffee, at lunch, etc.). The managers can ask the employees about their opinion as regards the SMART goals set, if they are still applicable, what need to be changed, what actions are taken by the management and are hindering the goal achievement.
2- Accessibility: -
• It is difficult to be an effective leader when you are inaccessible to the people who are on your team.
Leaders need to be accessible for two reasons:
1) Let people know what they are doing is noticed and appreciated with regard to goal attainment
2) To encourage opposition with the goals that are set. People in general have a tendency to commit to what they know is wrong (Groupthink). People need to say their honest opinion if to achieve goal even if it is against leader opinion
• Leaders need to reinforce their behavior in accordance to Superordinate and SMART goals. If they do not do so, indifference/laziness might emerge. As such recognizing people and being close to them is an effective way to laziness and indifference. Consequently, in goal setting, sense of unity, sense of one team is very important. In addition, employees need to feel that their needs and welfare are taken into consideration.
3- Measurement: -
• “Which gets measured, gets done”.
• Measurement conveys clearly what organizational decision makers believe is important, versus what they say is important.
• Effective leaders ensure that the measurement system is aligned with the Superordinate and SMART goals.
• When dysfunctional behavior is observed, the cause more frequently lies in the goals and/or measurement system than it does in the person who is exhibiting the behavior.
• Measurement systems have to be set in accordance with the goals. If you change the goal, than the behavior should be changed and hence the measurement system.
•
Chapter 3
How Goals Go Wild??
When goals are too specific
Unfortunately, goals can focus attention so narrowly that people overlook other important feature of a task. For example: Simons and Chabris’ researchers asked participants to watch a video in which two groups of players pass basketballs. One group wears white shirts; the other group wears dark shirts. As result of this narrow focus, most participants fail to notice when a man wearing a black gorilla suit walks into middle of the screen, pounds his chest and walks off screen and concentration on the counting task.
Three situations (types): -
1) Narrow goals: when people narrow their focus on the specific task required and hence outcome expected. Such focus will “blind” people from other important issues that appear to them unrelated to the goal.
• Tendency to focus too narrowly on goals is compounded when managers plan the wrong course by setting the wrong goal (e.g. setting revenue instead of profit goals). So, setting the correct/appropriate goal is a difficult process.
• Goal setting may cause people to ignore important dimensions of performance that are not specified by the goal-setting system. For example: a group of students are requested to proof read a paragraph that contains both grammatical and content errors. When students were given instruction to correct grammar or content (specific goal), the result wasn’t that satisfying. Many grammar or content errors were not corrected given that the focus was not general but specific (either on grammar or on content) Yet, when students were requested to correct the paragraph as a whole with no specific indications (do your best), students were more likely to correct both grammatical and content errors. So when no specific goal is set, people will look at the general image which might give better results.
• When managers set specific goals, they often fail to determine the broader results of their directives. The presence of goals might lead employees to focus on short-term gains and lose sight of potential devastating long-term effects on the organization.
2) Too many goals: when multiple goals are pursued at one time, this might cause problem for employees. Employees tend in that case to focus only on one goal. Some types of goals are more likely to be ignored than others. For example: researchers gave participants both quality and quantity goals. When quantity and quality goals were both difficult, participants sacrificed quality to meet the quantity goals Goals are easier to achieve and measure (such as quantity) may be given more attention than other goals (such as quality)
3) Inappropriate time horizon: even if goals are set correctly, time horizon to achieve them may be inappropriate.
Goals that emphasize immediate performance (e.g. this quarter’s profits) prompt managers to engage in myopic, short term behavior that harms the organization in the long run (for instant: companies that issued quarterly earnings reports frequently (short term goal) tended to invest less in research and development (long term goal)) The efforts to meet short-term targets occurred at the expenses of long-term growth. For example :New York City cab drivers; Cabs start to disappearing more quickly on rainy days than on sunny days , because of specific daily goal most cabs driver set. The time horizon problem is demonstrated as “post-pellet pause” means inactivity once a goal is achieved people relax and rest. For examples, a salesperson after meeting monthly sales quota, may spend the rest of month playing golf rather than working.
When goals are too challenging
• It has been demonstrated that a positive linear relationship exists between the difficulty of the goal and the employee performance. As such, to inspire effort, commitment, and performance, goal should be at the most challenging level possible but should not be so challenging that employees see no point in trying.
• Nevertheless, stretch/challenging goals can have serious side effects from shifting risk attitudes to promoting unethical behavior to triggering the psychological costs of goal failure. Three situations (types): -
1) Risk taking:
• Goal setting distorts risk preferences. People motivated by specific, challenging goals adopt riskier strategies (reference the assumption that high risk = better performance and higher profits) than those with less challenging goals or vague goals.
• Goals harm negotiation performance by increasing risky behavior. Negotiators with goals are more likely to fail to reach a profitable agreement than are negotiators who lack goals.
• The excessive focus on goals might hence lead to risk-taking behavior (cause of many real world disasters) Example: Continental bank in the U.S. was one of the most important banks. The bank set a new goal, and that is to increase within five years the magnitude of the bank’s lending ability.
To achieve this objective, the bank changed its strategy, bought loans from smaller bank and pursued borrowers. It could have been the seventh-largest U.S. bank if its borrowers had been able to repay their loans; instead, following massive loan defaults, the government had to bail out the bank.
• Check other examples on pp. 26 (mount Everest disaster)
2) Unethical behavior: -
Ø Goal setting is seen as a powerful motivation tool yet; it can lead and promote unethical behavior.
Ø Goal setting can promote two different types of cheating behavior (unethical behavior):
· When motivated by a goal, people may choose to use unethical methods to reach it. Example: at sears, and in order to reach the specific, challenging goal set by the administration, employees charged customers for unnecessary repairs.
· Goal setting can motivate people to report that they have met the goal when in fact they fell short. Example: employees from a certain organization who were driven to reach sales target reported sales that never took place.
Ø Goal setting is not the only cause of employee unethical behavior. It is an important ingredient but other aspects interfere as well:
· Lax oversight
· Financial incentives for meeting performance targets
· Organizational culture with a week commitment to ethics.
Ø The interplay between goal setting and organizational culture is extremely important.
· An ethical organizational culture can restrain in the harmful effects of goal setting, but at the same time, the use of goals can influence organizational culture.