Community Federal Bank recently hired Alfred Day as one of its branch managers. Alfred had been an internal auditing manager with First Federal Bank before taking the new position. Last week, Community Federal Bank auditors began an audit of Alfred’s branch, and within moments after the audit team arrived the first day, Alfred began criticizing everything the auditors did. At least once a day since then, Alfred has made the comment to the audit supervisor, ‘Boy, if I were still an auditor and you guys worked for me, I would fire you all. Why don’t you go learn what you’re doing before coming to audit my branch?” The audit supervisor knows that the team is well trained; in fact, the auditors are as well trained as Alfred. He knows because he has instructed auditing classes for the State Banking Association, where Alfred studied auditing. The supervisor knows some of the instructors Alfred studied under and actually reviewed some of Alfred’s work with one of the other instructors three years before. The supervisor considers his present team members to be at least as knowledgeable and skilled in internal auditing as Alfred, whose attitude is proving a hindrance to the successful completion of the audit.

Required:

Suppose you are the audit supervisor. Plan a meeting with Alfred to discuss the problem.

Remember both situational factors and message characteristics in your plan.