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This assignment is based on the assigned reading on psychological contracts (When Employees Feel Betrayed, see Blackboard). As this reading shows, when people are employed by an organization, they form what are termed Apsychological contracts@ with their employer. These contracts have important implications for organizational behavior.
Your Assignment
For this exercise, you are to interview someone who has been employed for at least six months in a full-time paid position. You can choose anyone who has such a job, however, for purposes of this exercise, it would be ideal to select someone who has had the following experience if you have access to such a person:
1. Someone who has been laid-off or knows that they are going to be laid-off. If the layoff was from a previous job, you could ask them to be interviewed about their previous job rather than the job they hold now. If they are waiting to be laid-off, interview them about their current position.
2. Someone who experienced an unexpected pay cut of some kind.
3. Someone who believed that they were promised a particular job or location and then received a different job assignment and/or location.
4. Someone who believed that they were promised a promotion or pay raise and did not receive it.
In short, you are seeking an “interviewee” who is willing and able to discuss an
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Copyright 8 2012. Professor Maura A. Belliveau for use by MAN 81 students.
expectation that they had of their employer and which the employer did not fulfill.
As you will see in the reading, there are different ways in which employers may fail to fulfill your interviewee’s expectation; what’s important is that your interviewee feels that there was something that they did not obtain that they believed that they had been promised in some form. (That is, they must be able to say Ayes@ to question 5 in the interview protocol that follows.)
Logistics
You should contact the person you plan to interview and request about one hour of their time. Explain that you would like to talk to them about their job experiences for your management course.
You can call them and do the interview over the phone, SKYPE, or interview someone in person. Do NOT do this assignment over email.
Remember to first ask if whomever you would like to interview has experienced at least one disappointment with an employer that has to do with one or more expectations that they had of their employer that has been unfulfilled. If someone says Ano@ to this question, they will not be a suitable person to interview and your should contact someone else.
You may find it useful to audio record your interview for your write-up. You can do so as long as you ask for your interviewee’s permission and the interviewee agrees. You should erase the recording after you have completed your paper and submitted it on Blackboard.
Interview Protocol
Here is the Ascript@ for describing what you are going to interview the person about:
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AI am interested in knowing about how you think about your relationship with your employer. Specifically, for this interview, I am going to ask you a series of questions about what you feel you owe to your employer and what your employer owes to you as an employee. These Amutual obligations@ are those things that you may have never been explicitly promised but that you felt were implied, as well as those things that have been explicitly promised and/or discussed. In essence, I am going to ask you about your beliefs regarding what is owed to you and what you owe to your employer—regardless of how those beliefs developed.
The questions that I will ask you are not highly sensitive but so you are aware of how I will use the information you provide, I’d like to give you a few details. I will be writing a short paper about this interview. In that paper, I can omit your name (if you prefer) but do need to include your job title, organizational tenure, and your employer’s name so my professor has a context to evaluate my interpretation of our discussion. Is citing your job title, tenure with your organization, and organization name okay with you? My professor will not use your organization=s name in any class discussion nor will my paper be seen by anyone other than my professor.”
Once you provide this information to your interviewee and they agree to participate, you are ready to proceed.
“Given that I=m going to ask you about such beliefs, maybe you can first tell me if it would be best to discuss your current job or a previous job.” [Make sure the interviewee picks one job as the focus of the interview. It does not matter if it is a current or previous job.]
PART A. Background Questions
1. Interview answers refer to: a) Current job ? Or b) Previous job ?
Please answer following questions with regard to whichever job you checked above:
2. Job title: ______________________________________________________________________
3. Organization: ________________________________________________________________
4. Is it okay for me to discuss my interview with you in a class discussion? Yes ? No ?
5. Amount of time (yrs./months) in job: ___________________
6. Amount of time (yrs./months) employed by this organization: ____________________
7. How many total years have you worked full-time in your career: ___________________
PART B.
1. I would first like to ask you how you think about your job in terms of specific things that you owe to your employer (e.g., a positive attitude, complete attention to your job when working, your best effort, your loyalty, willingness to go beyond your job description) which are not part of any written job description or a formal employment contract you have with your employer?
Can you tell me specifically what you believe you owe to your employer?
2. What do you think that your employer owes to you? [NOTE: This could include any explicit things that your interviewee feels that they had been promised (e.g., an annual performance evaluation with the potential to obtain a pay raise; increased job responsibilities) or implicit things that were promised (e.g., flexibility, a promotion once they were on the job for a certain period of time, consideration, loyalty to you and other employees).
Can you tell me specifically what you believe those things are that they owe to you are? [Try to get your interviewee to be specific to the degree that they can be.]
3. When/how did your sense of what you owed to your employer develop? (Examples: based on ongoing discussions with manager, based on initial conversations when hired. Try to obtain details on when/how the sense of the employer’s obligation to them formed.)
4. Research shows that failing to provide employees with what they come to expect from their employers can have very serious consequences for their attitudes and behavior on the job. Have you ever felt that the organization failed to fulfill your sense of what was owed to you?
If so, what was the unmet promise/obligation?
5. How did you respond—either in your attitudes or behaviors (e.g., prompted you to consider other job opportunities, reduce your effort, stop helping out beyond your own job, feel less committed to your employer, etc.)?
6. Have you ever felt—in your working life—that such a failure to provide what you believed had been promised occurred with any of your previous employers?
If so, how did you respond—either in your attitudes or behaviors—in those prior instances?
7. [Now refocus the interviewee on the job that was referenced in all of their other answers.] Did/have you observe(d) that coworkers were affected by (an) unmet promise(s)? Did you see a change in how they acted or felt? Did the workgroup and its effectiveness seem affected?
8. In a situation where you have experienced an unmet promise, was there anything that your manager or the organization could have done to rebuild your trust?
9. Even if there was at least one case where your employer did not provide what you expected, there are likely to be many other cases where your employer did provide what you expected. What did it mean to you when your employer did so? Do you ever consider the power of your employer fulfilling your expectations regarding their obligation(s) to you outside the context of this interview? Do you think that it affects your attitudes and behavior in your workplace? If so, how?
10. Maybe there is something you=d like to tell me that you have thought of while we have talked that might help me or my classmates understand the issue of mutual employee/employer obligation and how beliefs about such obligations affect you (or people generally) at work. Is there anything you would like to add?
THANK YOU VERY MUCH for helping me with this assignment. Your comments have been a big help!
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Your Write-Up
You will submit a typed four- to six-page paper (formatted in any 11 or 12pt font; 1.5 or double-spaced) containing the following components (please use the headers below—i.e., APart A,@ APart B,@ APart C@) in your paper.
Part A.
Interviewee=s responses to the background questions (you can cut and paste the template from the WORD version of the assignment as posted on Blackboard). THIS SHOULD APPEAR ON THE COVERSHEET OF YOUR PAPER, along with your name. The coversheet does not count as a page in the page limit for this exercise.
Part B.
Include your interviewee=s responses to questions #2, 3, 4 and 5 only in your paper.
You can paraphrase; you need not type a precise transcript of what the person said but do need to accurately represent what they told you overall.) Once you have typed their answers, you will provide your insights into those responses (and the interviewee=s experiences in general—even outside of the couple of questions you write up and turn in).
With regard to your comments/insights, try and describe why you think they feel as they do and/or why you think what they described is significant in terms of the assigned reading for this exercise. You should be sure to use terms from the reading in order to demonstrate your understanding of the concepts and ability to apply them to the Adata@ your interviewee provided.
You need not retype the questions from the protocol; just type the question #, the gist of the response, followed by your comments on the response. Please preface your comments with a sub-header (e.g., AMy Comments/Analysis@) so I can tell where the interviewee=s responses end and your insights begin.
Part C.
Examine the figure (that is, the diagram with boxes and arrows representing how employees think about their experiences) contained in the article, When Employees Feel Betrayed, that you read for this exercise. As the last portion of your write-up, pick a portion of your interviewee’s interview that you think clearly illustrates the power of psychological contracts and this model in explaining employee’s attitudes/behavior at work. Pick one portion of the model that you think your inteviewee’s data is particularly related to (I will explain in class). Describe in detail how your interviewee’s experience (as reported to you) illustrates that portion of the model.
Final—and Important—Suggestions
1. Proofread your paper at least twice. You proofread it at least once for meaning (i.e., read critically to determine if your sentences make sense, are as clear as they can be, and are communicating what you intend to communicate) and at least once for grammar and spelling.
2. Fix all errors and problems you catch in proofreading.
3. You may give your paper to a friend to read for clarity and grammar and/or are welcome to go the campus Writing Center to obtain help. You are responsible for creating all of the content of your paper. However, either a friend or a Writing Center staff member/volunteer can help you improve the written communication aspects of your paper. Neither of these steps violates the rules for this assignment.
4. This is your final assignment for a class in which you have been exposed to many specialized OB concepts. You need to ensure that your paper draws upon the assigned reading and uses the concepts in the article When Employees Feel Betrayed. If you do not cite concepts in that article and link them to your interview, then you have not succeeded in this assignment.
5. Here’s an example of a basic way that someone in my MAN 12 course linked their experience of job satisfaction to research showing factors at work that predict who tends to be more satisfied. This paper was submitted early on in the course. Your paper is being submitted as part of an advanced, capstone course and after you’ve already submitted written work for MAN 81 so I am providing it merely to show a first step in linking concepts and an employee’s personal experiences.
The past three summers I have been a [job title]. The work itself is not challenging and can be done by anyone who understands the [field within which the job is situated]. If it’s not the challenge of the work that makes me enjoy this job, then what is it?
First, my job provides me with a high level of person-job fit. I like [forms of engagement in this industry], and the idea of getting paid to be outside, in this work environment is very appealing.
Secondly, I build a lot of new relationships. Each summer, I work with different colleagues whose ages range from 25 to 65. I typically share a lot in common with the younger colleagues and enjoy interacting with them. Although I don’t have a lot of the same interests as the older colleagues, I always enjoy listening to their stories or words of wisdom during breaks in our jobs. These relationships at work also contribute to my level of job satisfaction.
You should strive to apply the concepts in the reading to your interviewee’s experience at an even higher level but for those of you who have not been able to visualize what I mean by “apply the course concepts,” the passage above is a small but useful example.
Please let me know if you have any questions. Good luck!
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