This week’s assignment is a case analysis. This assignment should only be completed AFTER you have thoroughly read and reviewed this week’s assigned readings AND you have thoroughly read and reviewed the assignment instructions and criteria in the assignment grading rubric. As you develop your response throughout the week, be sure to continually review the instructions and grading rubric to ensure that your response takes ALL the included criteria into consideration. 

Your assignment response should be submitted in a single document with the response for each case clearly and separately delineated within the same document. Your responses to each question within the case should also be clearly numbered. The minimum word count for this assignment is 750.

Please keep the following in mind about your assignment response:

• Before you submit your assignment response, ensure that it includes the appropriate number and types of citations and references, presented in the appropriate format.
• Your submission will receive a Turnitin similarity score which must meet the required less than 20% threshold. This may take minutes, several hours and possibly up to 24 hours depending on Turnitin’s queue length so please ensure that you complete your submission within enough time to edit it and received a revised score prior to the due date. 
• If your score is greater than the 20% threshold, please redo your response and resubmit it here again. You will be able to edit and resubmit your response as many times as necessary until the deadline. Submissions that exceed the 20% threshold after the deadline on Sunday night at 11.55pm CST will be assigned a grade of zero.
• If you opt to reference the course text, this does NOT count as an external reference but is a reference that is internal to the course. It should be cited appropriately.
• Within this course, Wikipedia and other open source sites are NOT considered reputable sources.  Webster’s dictionary and other online dictionaries WILL NOT be counted as a valid external reference.
• Be sure to place a header “References” above your list of references to reduce the likelihood that Turnitin will include those items in your similarity score. 
• More detail is better than less. Be thorough in your responses and ensure that your submission reflects sufficient depth, analysis, and critical thinking consistent with a graduate-level business course. Look beyond the words provided in the case to assess what may have led to the situation presented and possible unidentified consequences.

ASSIGNMENT

To fully address this case assignment, please read and analyze the assigned case. Your response for the case should be numbered and provide the following:

 1.      Summarize the key OB issues in the case relative to this week’s material (at least 2 key issues MUST be identified). Be sure to speak in OB language, using appropriate terminology to identify the concepts and issues you identify.

2.      Clearly link the key issues in the case back to relevant and specific course material covered. Be specific by identifying specific instances and scenarios in the case which demonstrate the OB issues and concepts identified. Explain how they are reflective of those specific OB issues.

3.      Make at least one recommendation(s) of how each of the key issues you identified should be handled at the organizational level of the case’s main character. Justify the merit of each of your recommendations and be sure to include your rationale for why you expect them to be effective in addressing the issues.

4.      Propose at least one executive or corporate level intervention for any one of your key issues to recommend how upper management can also play a part in addressing that issue. This response should be different from any of the recommendations offered in #3. Be sure to clearly identify which OB issue your organization level/executive level intervention is meant to address and how the intervention would be of benefit.

Case 1 – Equity in Academia

When the last student left Melinda Wilkerson’s office at 5:30 p.m., the young English Professor just sat, too exhausted to move. Her desk was piled high with student papers, journals, and recommendation forms. “There goes my weekend,” she thought to herself, knowing that just reading and commenting on the thirty journals would take up all of Saturday. She liked reading the journals, getting a glimpse of how her students were reacting to the novels and poems she had them read, watching them grow and change. But recently, as she picked up another journal from the bottomless pile or greeted another student with a smile, she often wondered whether it was all worth it. 

Wilkerson had had such a moment about an hour earlier, when Ron Agua, whose office was across the hall, had waved to her as he walked past her door. “I’m off to the Rat,” he announced. “Come join us if you ever get free.” For a moment Wilkerson had stared blankly at the student before her, pondering the scene at the Rathskeller, the university’s most popular restaurant and meeting place. Agua would be there with four or five of the department’s senior members, including Alice Bordy, the department chair. All would be glad to have her join them . . . if only she didn’t have so much work. 

At the start of her first year as an assistant professor, Wilkerson had accepted her overwhelming workload as part of the territory. Her paycheck was smaller and her hours longer than she had expected, but Agua and the other two new faculty members seemed to be suffering under the same burdens. 

But now, in her second semester, Wilkerson was beginning to feel that things weren’t right. The stream of students knocking on her door persisted, but she noticed that Agua was spending less time talking and more time at his word processor than he had during the first semester. When asked, Agua told her he had reduced his course load because of his extra work on the department’s hiring and library committees. He seemed surprised when Wilkerson admitted that she didn’t know there was such a thing as a course reduction. 

As the semester progressed, Wilkerson realized there was a lot she didn’t know about the way the department functioned. Agua would disappear once a week or so to give talks to groups around the state and then would turn those talks into papers for scholarly journals—something Wilkerson couldn’t dream of having time to do. She and Agua were still good friends, but she began to see differences in their approaches. “I cut down my office hours this semester,” he told her one day. “With all those students around all the time, I just never had a chance to get my work done.” 

Wilkerson had pondered that statement for a few weeks. She thought that dealing with students was “getting work done.” But when salaries for the following year were announced, she realized what Agua meant. He would be making almost $1,000 more than she; the human resources committee viewed his committee work as a valuable asset to the department, his talks around the state had already earned him notoriety, and his three upcoming publications clearly put him ahead of the other first-year professors. 

Wilkerson was confused. Agua hadn’t done anything sneaky or immoral—in fact, everything he did was admirable, things she would have liked to do. His trips to the Rat gave him the inside scoop on what to do and whom to talk to, but she couldn’t blame him for that either. She could have done exactly the same thing. They worked equally hard, she thought. Yet Agua already was the highly paid star, whereas she was just another overworked instructor. 

As she began piling all the books, papers, and journals into her bag, Wilkerson thought about what she could do. She could quit and go somewhere else where she might be more appreciated, but jobs were hard to find and she suspected that the same thing might happen there. She could charge sex discrimination and demand to be paid as much as Agua, but that would be unfair to him and she didn’t really feel discriminated against for being a woman. The university simply didn’t value what she did with her time as highly as it valued what Agua did with his. 

Putting on her coat, Wilkerson spotted a piece of paper that had dropped out of one of the journals. She picked it up and saw it was a note from Wendy Martin, one of her freshman students. “Professor Wilkerson,” it read, “I just wanted to thank you for taking the time to talk to me last week. I really needed to talk to someone experienced about it, and all my other professors are men, and I just couldn’t have talked to them. You helped me a whole lot.” 

Sighing, Wilkerson folded the note, put it in her bag, and closed her office door. Suddenly the pile of journals and the $1,000 didn’t seem so important.