personnel management You are the director of human resources at a small regional transportation office, overseeing 12 employees, Academic Homework Help

You are the director of
human resources at a small regional transportation office,

overseeing 12 employees.
 The office is responsible for assessing the safety of the

roads, bridges, sidewalks
etc. in the region and proposing transportation projects.

The office has little
control in what projects are funded (that’s done in Olympia) but

the state won’t fund
transportation projects without the office’s seal of approval,

meaning all transportation
projects in the region have to have the regional office’s

support.  You oversee
the offices 6 transportation engineers, 2 HR specialists and 4

secretaries.
 One secretary is dedicated to the HR staff and the other 3 are
shared

among the 6 engineers.
 As much of their work is conducted in their vehicles out in

the field, one secretary
for every two engineers should be enough.

The engineers consist of 5
young engineers (all male), the most senior of whom has

been out of grad school 4
years.  All are expertly credentialed, are familiar with the

most recent developments in
transportation technology and rely on advanced

statistical and computer
modeling that improve efficiency  but they have no

experience working with the
public and tend to focus on objective factors like

structural safety and
engineering standards instead of the communities wants and

needs.  The oldest
engineer in the office, Bob, grew up in the region, started his

career doing manual labor
for the DOT during the summer and rose up through the

ranks, eventually earning
an engineering degree.  For many years Bob was the

regional office so he’s
made a ton of contacts in the community (contractors, the

neighborhood associations,
etc.) where they know, trust and like him.  The

engineers work autonomously
from each other, with the exception of sharing

secretarial support, so
problems between engineers are rare.

You return to work after a
month off recuperating from knee surgery where you

find a letter from 3 of the
5 engineers complaining that Bob is monopolizing one of

the secretaries time.
 They complain one secretary works for Bob, while the other 5

engineers have to share two
secretaries.  You know that Bob isn’t wasting the

secretary’s time as getting
community and stakeholder input takes time and

meetings (arranged and put
together by the secretary) and he’s using secretarial

support consistent with the
agencies policies and mission.  But you also know the

office has grown a lot the
in the past few years and while the other engineers may

not need their allotted secretary support right
now, they may need it in the future

and you want to solve this
problem before it affects performance (people are

complaining but there has
been no affect on anyone’s performance yet).

While this is the first
you’re hearing of the engineers having a problem with Bob,

you already know that Bob
is unhappy with the engineers, who he thinks are overly

concerned with their own
engineering standards and are ignoring, and in some

cases, hostile to community
involvement.  You learn at an engineers meeting held

while you were away things
got tense when Bob said “It’s not our job to tell the

public what they can build”
and someone replied “we are engineers! That is exactly

what we do”.  Bob has
a lot of support in the community, can communicate

complicated engineering
information in ways that the public, the city council, etc.

can understand, has been
with the agency since he was a teenager and has

demonstrated a commitment
to public service throughout his career.  You know that

Bob is one of the most
valuable employees in your office but you also know you can’t

ignore the other engineers
complaints.

1.) 

Using either Goal Setting
Theory or Expectancy Theory to develop a plan for

Bob to address the
secretarial support problem.  Be thorough and specific.

2.) 

You’re concerned about the
simmering tensions between Bob and the

engineers in how they
understand their jobs and their differing priorities.

Draw up a plan to address this problem using
Theory X.