Joe Salatino, President of Great Northern American - Case Study Example

Joe Salatino, President of Great Northern American: Case Study Question 1 The case scenario clearly indicates that the Great Northern American is a Dallas based telemarketing company with a wide range of product lines including packaging tape, paper clips, pens, and pencils. Currently, the company pays attractive salaries to its employees as they are highly efficient to close sales quickly and effectively. From the case study, it is obvious that the company’s employees give great emphasis on forming solid relationship with their customers. Since the Great Northern American is a telemarketing company, its sales staff must have the ability to effectively understand customer pulse and thereby act thoughtfully to meet their needs. In order to understand customer behavior, firstly it is necessary to recognize what their perceptions and attributions are. For this, salespeople need to clearly identify the factors that influence people in forming perceptions and making attributions. An individual’s perception and attributions may be influenced by an array of factors including his way of living, family background, economic status, geographic locality, and many more. A clear knowledge of these factors would assist the company’s salespeople to understand a customer’s weaknesses. In other words, this situation may aid sales employees to understand what approach would be potential to influence the customer behavior. This understanding is important as it would be helpful for the employees to close sales as quickly as possible. In addition, such knowledge would greatly assist sales staff to sell more pieces of the same product to one customer and this practice in turn would directly contribute to the firm’s total sales volume. Furthermore, based on good customer knowledge, sales people can act in accordance with customers’ mental preferences. Undoubtedly, a satisfactory shopping experience would make a customer loyal to the company and hence he/she may subscribe to the organization for long term. In order to obtain such customer details, salespeople must maintain a good personal relationship with their employees. Question 2 The operant conditioning theory was proposed by the psychologist B.F. Skinner. Operant conditioning, or instrumental conditioning, is a learning method which is promoted by rewards and punishments for behavior (qtd in Coon and Mitterer, 226). For instance, a student achieves higher markets to get a reward from his/her teacher. This concept attempts to make a link between a particular behavior and consequences of that behavior. In contrast, the social learning theory holds the idea that people learn within a social context. To illustrate, if students see their colleague rewarded for being responsive in the classroom, they would probably try to be more active in next classes. This theory is supported by other models including modeling and observational learning. Albert Bandura is considered as the proposer of social learning theory. This theory is centered at three core assumptions. The first is that people can learn through observation and it is supported by three basic models including live model, verbal model, and symbolic model. The live model involves the demonstration of a particular behavior whereas the verbal model gives descriptions and explanations of that behavior. In contrast, modeling occurs in symbolic model by real or fictional characters displaying behaviors in media. The second assumption of social learning theory is that mental states are vital to learning whereas the third one states that learning may not necessarily result in behavior change. In the given case context, operant conditioning theory would be more appropriate for the president Joe Salatino to improve the current situation. As Wiley points out, traditionally it is found that sales employees are motivated by financial incentives more than anything else. The case study also indicates that the company spends huge amounts of money on commissions and bonuses. In this context, the firm’s employees are less likely to learn within the social context they operate. In addition, the social learning theory is based on a number of assumptions and this condition lessens the scope of the theory in the given workplace environment. In contrast, the operant conditioning model would provide Joe with more control over his sales workforce as this model contains provisions for punishments to prevent undesirable behaviors. Question 3 Joe can apply the selected learning theory (operant conditioning) in a number of ways to improve his employees’ performance. Firstly, this model can be directly linked to good employee morale and thereby indirectly to increased productivity in the workplace. A positive reinforcement in the form of verbal praise or pay increase would assist Joe to elicit a desired employee response. A positive response from employees in turn may aid the company to increase its productivity to a desired level. The Great North American may have numerous business projects to be completed in preplanned time. Such projects would involve a group of employees working together to accomplish a common goal. If any of the project team members fails to meet his/her individual duties and responsibilities, this situation would adversely affect the progress of the entire project. Consequently, such a situation may lead to conflicts among project team members, punishment from top executives, and loss of market reputation. As Fagnani points out, the operant conditioning model makes all employees accountable for their individual actions and attractively rewards outstandingly performing teams (“Operate conditioning”). Hence, this model may assist Joe to complete business projects successfully on time and within a fixed budget. Effective diversity management is another fruitful advantage of the operant conditioning concept. The emergence of globalization made employees globally mobile and this situation consequently led to increased level of cultural and ethnic diversity within most organizational settings. In this situation, managers with poor communication skill would often fail to communicate with a diverse group of employees effectively and this situation in turn may result in a productivity decline. The case study indicates that the company is growing rapidly. Therefore, Joe must ensure that his managers have the potential to effectively communicate with the growing employee base. In this context, the operant conditioning model would be beneficial for Joe to enhance leadership training programs and thereby make certain that his managers are efficient in handling a global audience. Finally, this model may benefit Joe to ensure effective customer service. Management theories suggest that continuous reinforcement would be an effective strategy when newly recruited employees are learning the firm’s customer service policy because reinforcement measures including pay increases would facilitate the learning process and ensure that customer needs are met effectively and timely. Question 4 Joe must have a clear view of the value of self-efficacy to ensure that he hires the most successful sales people. Primarily, Joe should assess whether an employee has the ability to keep personal contact with his customers since salesman-customer relationship can have a great influence on a telemarketing company. It is obvious that each customer has different behavioral traits and therefore the sales employee must be capable for identifying individual customer tastes and responding to them immediately. Hence, Joe should focus on candidates’ level of adaptability to changing business situations. In other words, he must examine how flexible the recruits are. Similarly, Joe should consider employee creativity as a determinant of his self-efficacy. In the modern business environment, the concept of employee creativity is considerably important as it assists organizations to trim down operating costs to a great extent. A creative employee does not require extensive training programs and therefore the organization can take advantages of both time and money. In addition, the sales people should hold effective communications skills. Joe should particularly asses how many units of the same product an employee can sell to a single customer. Finally, he should evaluate whether an employee has the potential to retain a customer who has purchased the company products once. Works Cited Coon, Dennis and Mitterer, John O. Introduction to Psychology: Gateways to Mind and Behavior. US: Cengage Learning, 2008. Print. Fagnani. Operate conditioning. Web 4 May 2012 Wiley, Carolin. What motivates employees according to over 40 years of motivation surveys. International Journal of Manpower, (1997), 18 (3): 263-280. Read More