Chapter 4
1. Why isn’t it always desirable or appropriate to use job enrichment when designing jobs? )How would you determine how enriched an individual employee’s job should be?
2. Assume that you are the job analyst at a bicycle manufacturing company in British Columbia and have been assigned responsibility for preparing job descriptions (including specifications) for

all the supervisory and managerial positions. One of the production managers has just indicated that he will not complete the job analysis questionnaire you have developed.
a. How would you handle this situation?
b. What arguments would you use to attempt to persuade him to change his mind?
c. If your persuasion efforts failed, how would you go about obtaining the job analysis information you need to develop the job description for his position?

3. Because the top job in a firm (such as president, executive director, or CEO) is by nature more strategic and broader in scope than any other job, is competency-based job analysis more

appropriate? Is there less need for a job description for the president? Why or why not?
4. If you were designing a job for a new marketing and sales representative for a small entrepreneurial company that is experiencing rapid growth, what approach would you take? Explain why

you would take this approach. How would you go about determining job specifications?
5. If a supervisor reviews the job analysis information provided by an employee and says that the job duties and responsibilities have been inflated, but the employee says that the supervisor

does not really know what the job entails, how can a decision be made about what information is accurate?

Chapter5
1.    Develop a realistic, hypothetical staffing table for a department or organization that you are familiar with.

2.    Contact the HR manager at a firm in your area and find out whether the firm uses any of the following: (a) skills/management inventories,(b) replacement charts or summaries, and (c) a

succession plan. Prepare a brief summary of the information gathered. Once you have completed these tasks, form a group with several of your classmates. Share your findings with the group

members. Were there similarities across firms? Did company size seem to make a difference in terms of strategies used for forecasting the supply of internal candidates? Can you identify any

other factors that seem to play a role in the choice of forecasting techniques used?

3. This assignment requires working in teams of five or six. Half of each team is to assume the role of management at a firm that is about to undergo major downsizing. The other half of each

team is to assume the role of employees-some who will be affected and others who will remain. Each management team is paired with an employee team and must prepare and role-play a

realistic meeting of the two parties. Managers should work toward minimizing the negative impact on those who will be affected as well as on those who will remain. Individuals in employee roles

should envision what their thoughts and feelings would be (if they have never actually been in this situation, that is) and to portray them as realistically as possible

4. Form teams of three or four people. Your instructor will assign you a position on the following statement: “All employees in an organization should be aware of their personal standing with

respect to replacement charts and succession planning.” Formulate your arguments to support your assigned position and then debate the statement with an opposing team, as instructed.

5. With a partner, research “survivor syndrome “and what specific companies have done to successfully mitigate this response and regain full employee commitment.  Prepare a brief (two to

three minute, maximum) oral presentation to share what you have learned.

Chapter 6
1    Describe how the recruitment process (including all of the steps) outlined in Figure 6.1 will be of assistance to Jennifer and Pierre to solve their recruitment problems.

2    Draft a new job posting for each of the seven positions discussed in the case. Then discuss how you put the job postings together and why, using Figure 6.2 and Figure 6.3 as examples.

Chapter7
1. Design a semi-structured interview questionnaire for a position with which you are extremely familiar, basing the candidate-specific questions on your own resume. Ensure that behavioral,

situational, job-knowledge, and worker-requirements questions are included. Once you have done so, select a partner. Role-play two selection interviews-one based on your questionnaire and

the other based on your partner’s questionnaire. The individual who wrote the questions is to play the role of interviewee, with his or her partner serving as the interviewer. Do order, take

effective notes, and bring the inter-view to a close. Once you have completed the two role-plays, critically evaluate each interview questionnaire.

2. Create an offer of employment for a successful customer service representative at a call center, outlining the terms and conditions of employment. Keep in mind that a copy of the letter

should be signed and returned by the new hire and that a signed letter of offer becomes an employment contract.

3. Using the NOC job description and the competency job analysis you created earlier in the course for either a university or college professor, Develop two situational and two behavioral

interview questions along with an outline of a “good” answer for each that you expect from the interviewees. Share and critique both questions and answers. Discuss how taking the time to

complete this activity can help in candidate selection.

Chapter8
1. Obtain a copy of an employee handbook from your employer or from some other organization. Review it and make recommendations for improvement.

2. Working individually or in groups, follows the steps in Figure 8.1 and prepares training pro-gram for a job that you currently hold or have had in the past.

3. In small groups of four to six students, complete the following exercise:
WestJet has asked you to quickly develop the outline of a training program for its new reservation clerks. Airline reservation clerks obviously need numerous skills to perform their jobs. (You

may want to start by listing the job’s main duties, using the information provided below.)Produce the requested training outline, making sure to be very specific about what you want to teach

the new clerks and what methods and aids you suggest using to train them.
Duties of Airline Reservation Clerks:
Customers contact airline reservation clerks to obtain flight schedules, prices, and itineraries. The reservation clerks look up the requested information on the airline’s flight schedule systems,

which are updated continuously. The reservation clerk must deal courteously and expeditiously with the customer and be able to quickly find alternative flight arrangements to provide the

customer with the itinerary that fits his or her needs. Alternative flights and prices must be found quickly so that the customer is not kept waiting and so that the reservation operations group

maintains its efficiency standards. It is often necessary to look under various routings, since there may be a dozen or more alternative routes between the customer’s starting point and

destination.

4. Working in groups of four to six students, complete the following exercise: Determine who in your group knows how to make paper objects such as cranes, boxes, balloons, ninja darts,

fortunes, boats, and so on. Select one person who is willing to be a subject matter expert (SME) to assist your group in developing an on-the-job training program to make one product.
Using the expertise of your SME, develop, document (refer to the sample job instruction template earlier in the chapter), and validate a training plan to make the chosen product. Modify the

documented plan as required after your pilot. Ensure that everyone in your group has a copy of the plan and can reliably make the product to standards. Once this is accomplished, each group

member will pair up with a member of another group that made a different product. Each person in the resulting pairs will train his or her partner on how to make the products using the training

plan and sample him or her created.
Debrief the exercise as instructed.

Chapter 9
Critical Thinking
1.    Do you think developmental job rotation is a good method to use for developing management trainees? Why or why not?

2.    Do you tell high-potential employees that they are on the “fast track”? How might this knowledge affect their behavior? How might the behavior of employees who are disappointed at

not being included in management development activities be affected?

3. How do you think employees are going to respond to the new focus on career planning, given the emphasis in recent years on “being in charge of your own career”?

Chapter 10
Critical Thinking
1. Assume you are presenting to an upper-year group of business students and one student asks the question, “Which performance appraisal system is the best?” How would you respond to that

question?

2. How can the problem of inconsistency between managers who are rating workers be solved or at least diminished? Make two or more suggestions.

3. Given the difficulty with providing traditional performance standards for jobs that are quite flexible, what sort of “standards” could be developed for these flexible jobs?

4. Some HR professionals avoid using BARS given that it is so time-consuming to develop. How could the development steps be streamlined?

5. Do you agree with the use of forced distribution methods to rate employees? Why or why not;

6. How might a supervisor handle a situation in which negative appraisals in the past have caused an employee to undervalue his or her performance?

7. Discuss how employees might respond to the proposed implementation of electronic performance management systems, such as call monitoring, and so on. How might an organization deal

with employees’ reactions?

8. How might a supervisor deal with an extremely defensive yet productive member of his or   “her team in the event of having to deliver the “improvement portion” of the employee’s

performance appraisal? What techniques would the supervisor need to use to maximize the efficacy of the appraisal and reduce the defensibility of the employee?

Chapter 11
1. Do you think that transactional or relational rewards have more impact on overall organizational performance?

2. Why do companies pay for compensation surveys where job matching may be difficult rather than conducting their own surveys?

3. It was recently reported in the news that the base pay for Canadian bank CEOs range in the millions of dollars, and the pay for the governor of the Bank of Canada is less than half of that of

the lowest paid bank CEO. How do your account for this difference? Should anything be done about this? Why or why not?

4. Do you agree with paying people for competencies and skills that they are rarely required to use on the job?

5. What are some of the potential reasons that gender-based pay discrimination is so hard to eradicate?

6. Why do you think there is such a discrepancy between the pay rates of executives and employees? Is this fair? Why or why not?

Chapter 12
1. A major consulting firm recently launched a new “project managers’ incentive” plan. Basically, serous managers in the company were told to award $5000 raises (not bonuses) to about 40

percent of the project managers in their team based on how good of a job they did in managing people on their projects, meeting deadlines, and the number of projects each project manager

was responsible for that year. There were no additional criteria provided, given the wide variance in 4 projects and teams that the consulting firm secures in a given year. What are the potential

advantages and pitfalls of such an incentive program? What areas of support or concern do you think project managers might have with the incentives? What areas of support or concern do you

think senior managers might have with the incentives?

Chapter 13
1.    What are pension “vesting” and “portability”? Why do you think these are (or are not) important to a recent university or college graduate?

Chapter 14
1.    ‘What is your opinion on the following question: “Is there such a thing as an accident-prone person?” What is the impact of your answer to this question on how organizations can

manage occupational health and safety in an organization?

Chapter 15

1.    Discuss the options presented as alternatives to layoffs. Which of these would appeal to you, your family members, and friends? Why? What challenges do these alternatives pose to

organizations?
Chapter 16
1.    As the HR manager, how would you handle a situation in which a supervisor has knowingly violated the collective agreement when scheduling overtime?
Chapter17
1.    You are president of a small business. In what ways do you expect that being involved in international business activity will affect HRM in your business?