Mgt5305 Strategic Management: Porter'S Frameworks Assessment Answer

1. Rewards consist of all organizational components involved in allocating compensation and benefits to employees in exchange for their contribution to the organization. The purpose of rewards is to attract, retain, and motivate qualified employees.

Dan Price, founder and CEO of Gravity Payments in Seattle, Washington, USA, chose to pay his workers a minimum salary of $70,000 a year. What led (inspired, caused) Price to do this, based on the Inc. Company’s website story, “Here's What Really Happened at That Company That Set a $70,000 Minimum Wage”?

What do you think of Price’s decision to offer such a high minimum wage to his workers? Was it motivating? Were all of his employees and customers happy with the decision? If you were a business owner, would you do the same, or not? Why or why not? (Base your answer on the two videos listed on our Jenzabar site: $70,000 Minimum Wage, and Gravity Payments 1 Year Later.)

2. You are the VP in charge of flight attendants at Ryan Air. Your company has gotten a lot of complaints from passengers on social media. The complaints are generally based on poor attitudes and poor customer service by your flight attendants.

Your job is to provide the best customer experience for all your passengers at Ryan Air as VP of Flight Crew (as opposed to Cabin Crew, which are the pilots). What steps will you take to motivate your flight attendants so that customer complaints decrease and customer satisfaction increases? Will it be necessary to fire some employees and create new training programs to recruit more motivated employees? Can you motivate the existing employees without the need to fire employees? What will motivate your flight attendants to always provide the best customer service they can? How can you increase the job satisfaction of your flight crew, which you believe will result in better customer service and fewer complaints from passengers?

3. Is work-life balance possible or is it a myth? (Support your answer with the Off-Balance On Purposevideo and the Rethinking Work-Life Balancevideos.)

4. Going back to the scenario in question #3, you are again the VP of Flight Crew at Ryan Air. You are continuing to work to improve customer experience on your airline, but you have found that for some of the flight crew, the problem is that they have bad attitudes about their work and about many of their customers.

Specifically, while the flight crew know that their #1 responsibility is customer safety, they realize that they never, or rarely are required to apply their training in customer safety. Instead, most often, they are simply “cocktail waitresses” at 30,000 feet, serving food and drinks. Also, some of your flight crew have bad attitudes about the customers, believing that most passengers (PAX in airline-speak) don’t respect the work that flight attendants do, and don’t understand that they are there primarily to ensure customer safety. They feel that they are treated disrespectfully and expected to be servants of increasingly rude and often intoxicated and belligerent customers.

Assuming it’s possible, what will you do to change these flight attendants’ attitudes? Is it possible, or should you just fire them? Realize that if you fire employees, you’ve just cost your company a lot of money and other resources in time, training and monetary compensation. So, if you decide that you should fire employees, you had better be able to convince your supervisors that it was the only solution to the problem.

How can you change your flight attendants’ attitudes about their jobs and about their customers?

Porter's Frameworks and the Resource-Based View of the Firm: A comparative Analysis.

decision was good. I am supporting the decision made by the CEO. This is so motivating because it improves the life of works. Some employees and customers saw it as a set up to promote his political profile. I would make decisions similar to those of CEO to motivate my workers because it is a way of motivating.

2

First step, I will train attendants on how to deal with different customers. Second step; I will give attendants the freedom to express their issue concerning the matter. I will not fire the attendants but show them benefits of good services to customers (Schmitt, 2010). I will motivate attendants by training on how to interact with different customers effectively.

3

Work-life balance is possible because it embraces on uncertainty (Delecta, 2011). It creates all that everyone will aspire to be. It is very possible because every day we are looking for better lives. Perfect balance is not achievable so we need to try our best to fulfill what is difficult to achieve.

4

First of all, I will inform the attendants just to focus on their job and forget about whether customers will respect them or not. After all, they are earning what they deserve. I will explain them on how difficult to deal with customers and it takes only endurance.  To some extent, I will fire those who are completely inflexible to the motivation on good attendance of the customers but explain the matter to the remaining and apologize that it was not my wish but just last option.

References

Schmitt, B. H. (2010). Experiential marketing: How to get customers to sense, feel, think, act, relate. Simon and Schuster.  

Delecta, P. (2011). Work life balance. International Journal of Current Research, 3(4), 186-189.