BUS103e
Organisational Behaviour
Assignment 2 – Group-based Assignment
January 2017 Presentation BUS103e Assignment 2 Group-based Assignment
This assignment is worth 30% of the final mark for BUS103e Organisational Behaviour.
The cut-off date for this assignment is 20 February 2017, 2355hrs.
This is a group-based assignment. You should form a group of 3 members from your
seminar group. Each group is required to upload a single report to Canvas via your respective
seminar group. Please elect a group leader. The responsibility of the group leader is to upload
the report on behalf of the group.
It is important for each group member to contribute substantially to the final submitted work.
All group members are equally responsible for the entire submitted assignment. If you feel
that the work distribution is inequitable to either yourself or your group mates, please
highlight this to your instructor as soon as possible. Your instructor will then investigate and
decide on any action that needs to be taken. It is not necessary for all group members to be
awarded the same mark. SIM UNIVERSITY Assignment 2 – Page 2 of 6 BUS103e Assignment 2 Important Note: Grading of TMA/GBA/ECA Submissions
Marks awarded to your assignment are based on the following guidelines:
1. 80% of the marks are allocated to the content of your answers: The marks awarded to what your answers cover depend on the extent to which they
cover the key points that correctly and comprehensively address each question. The key points should be supported by evidence drawn from course materials and,
wherever relevant, from other credible sources.
2. 20% of the marks are allocated to the presentation of your answers:
Wherever applicable, the marks awarded to how your answers are presented depend
on the extent to which your answers: form a sound reasoning by developing those key points in a clear, logical and succinct
manner; provide proper and adequate in-text citations and referencing to content drawn from
course materials and other credible sources; strictly follow APA formatting and style guidelines1, in particular for: in-text citations and end-of-report references; the identification of figures and tables; use, wherever relevant, the specialised vocabulary and terminology commonly used in
discussions about the topic(s) covered by each question; provide a reference or bibliography at the end of the main report; include the less relevant details in an Appendix; use sentence constructions that are grammatically and syntactically correct; are free from spelling mistakes; present the workings, numerical formulations and
results in a logical manner that follows the APA formatting and style guidelines; design and present graphs, diagrams and plots that follow the APA formatting and
style guidelines; are highly original; have proper formatting, which may: include a properly formatted cover page; respect the answer length/word count set out in the assignment guidelines, if
any is prescribed; present answers in paragraphs with proper spacing and page margins; include page numbers and appendices, if necessary.
1 You can find a short tutorial on the APA formatting and style guidelines here: https://is.gd/mgEOnC .
Additional details (pertaining to tables and figures) can be found here: https://is.gd/O4vDdT . SIM UNIVERSITY Assignment 2 – Page 3 of 6 BUS103e Assignment 2 Case Study – Unusual Health Products
Background
Unusual Health (UH) is a company that imports health products from different regions of the
world and sells these products to the local market. UH employs salespeople who sell the
products at various locations and using different channels, through direct contact with
customers.
In the initial years, salespeople worked independently and looked for their own contacts.
Business was good as the products were reasonably priced and the salespeople provided good
service. However, in the recent years, demand for UH products decreased due to increased
competition offering a growing number of similar health products sold in the same market.
Even UH’s regular customers were beginning to switch to competing products. The morale of
the UH salespeople was low as they regularly failed to meet their monthly sales targets.
Teams at UH
The manager at UH decided that the way to boost morale and sales was to have the
salespeople work in teams instead of individually, an idea that he decided to implement after
reading some management articles on the benefits of team work.
To make it easier for him to manage the teams, he decided it would be best not to have too
many teams. Hence, the salespeople were divided into a few teams of 15 people. He
appointed a team leader for each team. With the new team arrangement, performance
evaluation and reward for each salesperson remained the same. Salesmen were rewarded with
individual bonuses based on individual sales targets. In addition, each month, the team leader
was also rewarded with an individual bonus if his team achieved the highest level of sales.
Albert was one of the team leaders. To improve the sales in his team, he decided that all
salespeople should share their customer contacts with the rest of the team. This way, if a
salesperson was not available when the customer wanted to purchase products, another
salesperson could easily take over and serve the customer, a policy that created tension within
the team as some salespeople were being accused of “stealing customers”. There were also
salespeople who were not motivated to look for new customers as they simply relied on the
customer contacts from the other salespeople in their team. The high-performing salespeople
were also unwilling to share their customer contacts as they felt that it would not improve
their individual performance evaluation. They also felt that they had worked hard over the
years to establish regular customers and feared that their performance would be adversely
affected if their customers were “stolen” by other salespeople. They were also unwilling to
look for new customers as this meant sharing the contacts with the other salespeople in the
team. There were also rumours that some salespeople were bad-mouthing other salespeople
in front of the customers.
Ben was another team leader. Like Albert, he was facing various issues in his own team of 15
salespeople. Although he tried to organize team meetings every week to share updates and
sales tips, most of his salespeople were unwilling to share information. They did not really
know each other as they had worked independently before the teams were formed. Some of
them did not enjoy working in teams and stopped attending team meetings altogether because
they did not see the benefit of such meetings nor how they could help their sales
performance. For salespeople, team meeting attendance was a burden as it meant that they SIM UNIVERSITY Assignment 2 – Page 4 of 6 BUS103e Assignment 2 had to be in the office for that day of the week. A few salespeople started taking medical
leave on the meeting days as they found team meetings to be boring and did not like to attend
the meetings.
Caleb was another team leader. He was zealous about his new role. He decided that he should
manage his salespeople closely and in a systematic manner so that they could maximize their
sales. He developed a roster for the salespeople and also assigned them to various
geographical regions. Each salesperson must follow the schedule and cover the region that
Caleb had assigned. In addition, all the salespeople must submit timesheets every week to
indicate the hours worked and the progress made in their assigned regions. Some of the
salespeople were unhappy with the new arrangement, as they were assigned to regions that
were far from their homes and their regular customers. Other sales people were also unhappy
as they could not choose their working hours. They did not see the rationale of working fixed
hours as they were doing direct sales. They started grumbling about Caleb. Some of them
decided to ignore Caleb’s arrangement and went back to their usual way of meeting
customers at their preferred schedule.
Dilemma
After a few months of setting up the sales teams, the manager was dismayed to see that sales
had further declined instead of improving. Some of his best salespeople had also tendered
their resignation, especially those from Albert’s team. The manager did not understand what
was wrong as he thought that teams should help improve performance. He did not know what
to do. Should he do away with the teams? If not, how should he improve team performance
so that overall sales performance improves? Question 1 (Word Limit: 1000)
(a) What is the purpose of studying OB? Describe an example where knowledge of OB
can be applied in your workplace.
(5 marks) (b) One of the ways to apply OB concepts in this case is to examine the job attitude of
employees. List and explain the three (3) components of attitude, using examples
from this case.
(12 marks) (c) Explain the four (4) major work-related attitudes that are relevant to organisational
behaviour. Which work-related attitude is affected in this case? Explain your answer.
(15 marks) Question 2 (Word Limit: 1000)
(a) We have learned three contemporary theories of motivation. Explain one of the
theories which is relevant to this case and describe how it is illustrated in this case.
(10 marks) SIM UNIVERSITY Assignment 2 – Page 5 of 6 BUS103e (b) Assignment 2 Describe the Job Characteristics Model. Determine which job dimension was changed
with the team arrangement and explain how that dimension was affected.
(18 marks) Question 3 (Word Limit: 1200)
(a) State four (4) benefits of work teams compared to groups. Do you think the teams in
UH demonstrate these benefits? Explain.
(8 marks) (b) Identify and describe four (4) issues in the teams that affected performance. For each
issue, suggest solutions that are likely to make the teams more effective.
(32 marks) —- END OF ASSIGNMENT —- SIM UNIVERSITY Assignment 2 – Page 6 of 6
