Motivational
Paper instructions:

Paper instructions:
Read the following case and answer the questions at the end. Julio is driving to work on a Monday morning, thinking to himself: “What should I do? The job that I have always dreamed of having is becoming a nightmare. How can I motivate my unit under these conditions?” Julio is the manager of a unit of 19 people; two are support staff and 17 are case workers. The state is experiencing severe cut-backs. Of course most of the problem stems from the general dreadful economy, the state legislature is wildly unpopular, and with it, there is a tremendous anti-government sentiment relative to resisting higher taxes and wanting social programs to be trimmed, just when demand is rising. Julio is finding that managing is becoming more challenging. He was a case worker himself for 11 years, before becoming a supervisor for an additional 8 years. He had been a manager for just two years. He is still close enough to the work that he is as proficient as anyone else in the unit at processing cases. Four years ago his unit had 22 people and about 10% less work. When he became manager he had two supervisors who were responsible for half-time case loads and half-time monitoring and training. Cuts in the agency have meant both fewer workers and less “management” throughout the agency. Thus when one of his supervisors retired he was not surprised that the Division Director did not replace that person, even with a case worker. But he was shocked when the Division Director explained to him late last Friday that his other, very good supervisor was promoting out of the unit and that position, too, was not being filled. Now Julio, as a manager without supervisors, will become entirely in charge of all case monitoring to ensure accuracy rates are met in order to remain in compliance for matching federal dollars. He now will be responsible for all the individual and group training. The training budget has been cut to the extent that there is only enough for a couple of people to travel to a national conference or about half of the unit to go to a regional conference. Fortunately, turn-over has ceased to be a problem in the bad economy. Unfortunately, he now has four low performers whose error rates are generally within the allowable limits but whose work is sloppy and slow. In fact, one of the problems is that as morale has deteriorated with salary freezes and increased workloads so the general sentiment is not to rise to the occasion, but to do work as usual. After all, almost all of the case workers reason, the new norm is relatively permanent so why not stay permanently behind? Disturbingly, two of the three best workers-more hard-working and efficient than ever-have started to take on very negative, even surly, attitudes. Julio has realized that he has started to blame the state and the environment for the woes of the unit. In fact Julio has been under a good deal of stress himself, since his wife was laid off from her job six months ago and his youngest child was diagnosed with a severe learning disability. Julio is finding it more difficult to be a good listener when workers want to share there own stories of woes-illnesses, deaths in the family, children with difficulties, unexpected financial set-backs, etc. that used to make him seem caring. So as Julio drives into work he again mulls over the question, “what can I do to enhance the motivation in my unit?” Be sure to analyze and discuss the following scenario in terms of motivation theory and reference your text. (a) What are the motivational factors that are leading to a deteriorating morale? (b) Although the attitudes of the best and worst workers are experiencing declines, the reasons for and reactions to the organizational challenges are different. According to motivation theory, what are the differences? (c) What concrete actions should Julio take?