Effects of Job Rotation

Discuss the various issues of managerial behaviour and related matters raised by this case study Laurie J. Mullins argues that A fist step in the effective management of other people is confidence in your own ability, and awareness of your own strengths and weaknesses. Why is it then that managers find it difficult to admit their mistakes, to say sorry or to laugh at themselves? 1 In the building society case study, there are examples of bad managerial behaviour on the part of both Mary Rodgers, the branch manager and Jane Taylor, the senior branch assistant.Jane Taylor was clearly good at her job if, after four years, she was promoted to this new role, yet within a short period of time, she was having trouble with Tony Jackson. Looking back at what Mullins said, Miss Taylor doesn't appear to have confidence in her own ability or indeed awareness in her own strengths and weaknesses. According to Thompson ; McHugh â€Å"control is not an end in itself, but a means to transform the ca pacity to work established by the wage relation into profitable production†, and Jane is unable to control her sub-ordinate – what are the reasons for this?Part of the problem stems from the beginning of the case study and the relationship between Jane and her manager. Mary Rogers does not instil any confidence in Jane when she effectively ‘dumps' this new role. Up until now, Jane has been performing specific task functions and has no real knowledge of how to manage people as she has previously been performing the duties of a cashier and looking after mortgage advice accounts – more task orientated skills rather than managerial ones. The refresher course she attends includes nothing on this either and Jane immediately falls into what McGregor calls the ‘Theory X' assumption of human nature.The central principle of ‘Theory X' is direction and control through a centralised system of organisation and exercise of authority2 and Jane automatically tr ies to coerce and direct Tony Jackson. The inability of Mary Rodgers to provide effective support and development for Jane shows a clear ineptitude on her part. She admits herself that the reason for Jane's promotion is that â€Å"I [Mary] need someone to take some of the weight off my shoulders† and she seems to be reluctant to help intervene and solve

Marketing Promotional Mix Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Marketing Promotional Mix - Essay Example The message must be comprehensible, concise, enlightening and communicative, because this will help to make certain that mothers understand your offering. 1.2 Defining a need the product or service can fulfill Underlying the importance of the Heart Monitor in the best possible manner would create a need in the minds of the customers. Persuasive messages would help more in the cause. The goal would be to convince mothers that the product will provide the best value to them, compared to the competitors. This can be supported by giving competitive pricing and other customer oriented benefits. You may also want to create an urgent demand by proffering limited time offers and other attractive offers. 1.3 Encouraging action from the target: Once you have created an awareness of the product and persuaded the target market, now it is the time to compel them to purchase the product. All the efforts to persuade the customers and to create awareness would go in vain if the customer does not mak e a purchase. It is very important to inform the customers about the product so that they patronise your brand and become a core buyer and make a repurchase. (Alyn, 2009) 2. Promotional Mix 2.1 Advertising Advertising is defined as any paid form of non-personal promotion of products and services by a sponsor. The Heart monitor can be advertised on print and broad media. Although, it can be very expensive, it allows the company to dramatise its products through the artful use of print, sound and color. By placing the ad in different medium the company would get a chance to unleash the product whole heartedly into the market. The customers would get to view the product and would see the various attributes, features and benefits of it. Advertising would enable Mothercare to recur a message numerous times, and would let the buyer receive and evaluate the ad and the underlying messages of various competitors. The ad should be clearly planned out and should be a breakthrough ad; it should be the one which would successfully break the clutter. For this purpose, most organisations take the services of a creative agency which aims at bring the advertising message strategy to life in a distinctive and memorable way. A creative ad would help to build a long-term image for Baby Heart Monitor. It would also trigger quick sales as a result. 2.2 Public Relations Public Relations is defined as building excellent relations with the company's assorted publics or stakeholders by acquiring constructive and positive publicity, strengthening a high-quality communal representation and managing and resolving inauspicious hearsays, anecdotes and events. The Public Relations (PR) department at Mothercare can use many different tools to promote the Baby Heart Monitor; Mothercare can call press and media before launching their product by creating and placing interesting information in the news medium to catch the attention of attention to a person, product or service. Product Publicity i s a free form of promotion and it takes the goodwill of the brand coupled with its image to get publicised. Mothercare can use its goodwill to allow various TV channels into publicising specific products via documentaries and infotainment news. Mothercare can make full use of its positive image, and the goodwill to build and maintain local, national and international relations. Mothercare can also build and maintain relations with legislators and government officials to influence legislation

What impact does age has on technostress Research Paper

What impact does age has on technostress - Research Paper Example Adapting to technology is not usually simple, and this has led to a health concern; the pressure resulting from extensive technology use has led to technostress, which is a modern ailment caused by people’s incapability to deal with new technologies in a good way. Technostress also refers to all the unconstructive impacts on behaviors, body physiology, and thoughts resulting directly or indirectly from technology (Coklar & Sahin, 2011). It affects the memory thereby causing people to lose track of what they wanted to say or do. Technostress is usually evident in two different but interconnected forms: in the effort to understand technology and in over-identification with computer technology. It affects professionals and executives, librarians, bankers, students and adolescents, librarians, store clerks, internet users, home computer users, and officer support personnel and many other people. The underlying causes of technostress include issues of technology anxiety, time management, lack of proper training, an increased workload, the quick pace of technological change, the reliability on software and hardware, and lack of standardization with technologies (Ennis, 2005). It is dependent on age, gender, and literacy. Tarafdar et al. (2007) disc overed that the elders experience less technostress than younger people at work, women experience lower technostress than men, and those with superior computer literacy than those who without. Studies investigating the impact of age on technostress are limited and hence this research seeks to examine this relationship. The negative psychological connection between persons and introduction of new technologies affects people’s productivity. Technostress manifests itself in every person in various degrees depending on age. This prevents coping or adapting to information in a healthy way, which prevents them from being productive. Most individuals feel compulsive about

Poem analysis Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words - 3

Poem analysis - Essay Example The poem has no specific setting since it describes the struggles of a man rather than where he is, but it could be argued that the setting is that of a house since that is where the author would feel most lonely without the presence of his wife. From this poem is it clear that no matter how attached or how much pain we experience after losing a loved one, we eventually learn to live without them. The poem talks about the author’s grief for his dead wife and how he finally managed to cope with his loss. The whole poem is one huge metaphor of a man stressed with the weight of the box on him while in the real sense the whole scenario actually represents the author struggling with his grief over losing his wife. All 13 lines of the poem are metaphors describing the grief of the author. For example, the author says, â€Å"He manages like somebody carrying a box that is too heavy, first with his arms underneath† (line 1-3). The writer vividly explains how he managed to get on with his daily routines after his wife died, how hard it was to live a normal life with her around. The author uses hyperbole when he says that he managed to life but like someone carrying a box that is too heavy for him such that he has to use his entire body to hold the weight. He uses this exaggeration to help the reader understand the intensity of his pain and grief. The author carries on with the metaphor until the finale of the poem where he says â€Å"but now, the man can hold underneath again, so th at he can go on without putting the box down† (line 11-13). The author simply says that after much struggle with his grief he eventually learned to deal and handle it so well that he could almost live a normal life without sadness and a sense of loss. By symbolizing his experience with grief with a man struggling with a heavy box, the author has managed to make the reader experience his

Welfare Benefits Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Welfare Benefits - Research Paper Example Although it was meant to help members of the American society deal with the crisis, which was affecting them at the time, many of its opponents believed that what it proposed was socialism; something that they believed was not in line with the American way of life. During this period, the greater part of women and people from minority groups in American society were excluded from getting any remuneration from the unemployment insurance and pensions for the elderly. In recent times, however, there have been reforms to the program and each state has its own welfare system according to the needs of its people. Since its inception, the provisions of welfare have been changing often due to the worries brought about by the situations of the economy as well as the changing roles of gender and the integration of minority groups into the American mainstream. During the 1950s, there were debates that focused more on how adequate coverage could be provided, moving away from the focus on which g roups of occupation could be included, as had been done before. Since then all the changes in Social Security have been attempts to bring about a balance between the provision of adequate protection as well as the promotion of equality while providing this security (Beland, 2008). When the original Social Security Act is compared to those of European countries during the same period, one will find that it does not include the range of programs that had been developed in these countries. This is because when this Act was formulated, it was done with the anticipation that any additional programs of social insurance and income support would be put in place later. Examples of such expected extensions are the providing of benefits for spouses and children, which was passed in 1939 and the passing of programs of assistance and insurance for the disabled people in the 1950s. The development of programs in other areas took more of a problem-solving and incremental approach. Hence, the Medic are and Medicaid programs were endorsed in 1965 as a response to specific medical care needs of the elderly in society and the professed insufficiency of medical care under public support (Social Security Bulletin, 2006). The introduction of the Food Stamp program in 1964 and its later extensive growth came as a response to the evidence that there was persistent hunger and malnutrition in some groups within the population despite the fact that the society was generally affluent. The Supplemental Security Income program was introduced in 1974 as a national minimum income guarantee for those people who were aged, blind, and disabled in society and this was to counteract the differences in the advantage levels and eligibility values appropriate to these people under the assistance programs. The Food Stamp program is available to individuals and families who are eligible for payments under the Supplemental Security Income Program and to those deprived persons and families who are not su itable for the latter program. Another characteristic of the development of social welfare policy in the United States is the considerable degree of decentralization that is displayed and a mechanism for this is the federal system of government, which divides responsibility among the federal, state, and local governments. Some of these programs are funded and administered by the federal government alone; others involve only the state, with or without the involvement of local governments; and finally, others involve all three levels of government. This federal structure serves three main purposes in this welfare policy and these are the dispersal of

Request for proposal Research Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Request for - Research Proposal Example The firm is seeking an appropriately qualified contractor to provide a â€Å"turnkey† solution of an Integrated Information system that will cover the operation and business needs of the business. Your firm is invited to submit a proposal for undertaking the work described in this Request for Proposal (RFP). The IT system to be delivered by the contractor must fully cover the business needs of the restaurant business. Following are described the main components of the system, which include the Ordering (POS) application, the back office/finance subsystem and the website application. Ordering Application (POS System). The POS system will provide a full flow of a customer orders from the time they are ordered, until the final bill issuance. The waiter must be able to register the order of the customer, and pass it via the restaurant wireless network to the kitchen. Kitchen personnel will receive the order and start preparing the food. Waiter in charge of the order must be informed with a message when the order is ready, and will serve it to the customer. In that way no time will be missed at all as the waiter can be busy with many orders in parallel without having to be all the time close to the kitchen, waiting for the food to be served. At the time when the customer asks for the bill, waiter sends a message to the central computer system. The receipt is automatically printed by the POS portable device printer and is delivered to the customer, so that the waiting time for bill issuance is minimal. The POS system must support 5 waiters, and should be expandable t o 15. POS application must have a graphical interface that will display a plan of the restaurant at any time, so that the waiter is able to easily select and monitor the orders of each table in a convenient way. In addition, POS application must support a user friendly menu table, as

UK Retail Banking Sector Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3500 words

UK Retail Banking Sector - Essay Example These form 90% of the total market share of the industry. HSBC takes the top position with assets worth $1,267,777 million. The major groups within which this sector can be divided are the big banks, also called High Street banks, the Building Societies, and the Direct Banks. The High Street banks are the normal banks which provide accounts and loans to customers and businesses. They also have branches which can be accessed by customers. â€Å"Building societies are mutual societies, which are owned by their members for the benefit of members i.e. of both savers and borrowers alike.† (Davidmann 2006). These societies were earlier catering to the mortgage market only but have now started providing deposit and accounts to the customers very much like the normal banks. Direct Banks do not have any branches but reach the customer through the internet and other electronic sources. Many High Street banks like HSBC and Barclays also provide direct banking solutions for the convenience of the consumers but unlike Direct Banks, they have their branches for other activities like product sale etc. Tesco Perso nal Finance, First Direct, and Egg are some examples of Direct Banks in the UK. As stated earlier, HSBC holds the top position by market value also at 122.29 pounds (2010). Building societies are not listed but Nationwide building society is one of the main financial institutes. These societies have now started working more or less like banks. The retail banking sector provides loans for various needs and attract deposits from customers to partly finance these loans. The transactions are mostly small in value but high in volume (Buckle and Thompson 2004). As this sector earns through volumes, it is very important to attract customers by providing product differentiation. This is provided by most of the banks by using highly complex Information Technology networks.