Due date: 03-May-2018
Return date: 24-May-2018
Length: 2,500
Submission method options
Alternative submission method
Motivating and empowering workforce is one of the key managerial tasks. However, not all managers have a background in organisational behaviour and hence, their understanding on how to motivate employees may be limited.
As a group, choose a workplace trend of your choice (e.g., flexible work arrangements, work-life balance, outsourcing, casualization of the workforce, telecommuting, knowledge management, process re-engineering, ethics and values, millennials, technology, etc.) and discuss the following:
a) The workplace trend of your choice,
b) Implications of the chosen trend for the changing nature of the employer-employee relations,
c) Implications of the chosen trend for the employee motivation,
d) Critique two OB theories of motivation (of your choice) in motivating employees in relation to the OB trend (critique them based on their strengths, weaknesses and applicability in relation to the OB trend), and
e) Three recommendations for organisational practice for improving employee motivation and justified based on the relevant academic literature (e.g., journal articles, academic conference papers, government reports, and books)
Organise a group of minimally 4 and maximum 5 members with your peers in this subject in the week four of the session. Group members need to self-enrol in a group by using Interact2 tool: Groups. Additional instructions on doing this will be provided in week 3 of the session. You are encouraged to use a discussion forum on Interact2 site specifically designed for students to send posts and find group members. Once you have a group of 4 members, organise a virtual meeting (e.g., Skype might be useful and easy to use for the first meeting) with your group to get to know each other (strengths in different academic skills), and to discuss the workload allocation for this assignment, communication schedule and tools, and goals that you want to achieve in this assignment.
Note: Team members who do not contribute to the group will not share the group's marks, and can be removed from the group if the group requests this in an email to the lecturer.
Rationale
This assignment is designed to develop further understanding of an OB topic/trend and ways of dealing with its implications in the workplace. Learning objectives addressed in this assignment are as follows:
be able to critically examine assumptions and propositions of theorising about organisational behaviour in general;
be able to compare and analyse the strengths and weaknesses of organisational behaviour theories relevant to managers with human resource responsibilities;
be able to critique and to apply organisational behaviour theories and concepts to case studies and/or issues in their own workplaces; and