Sarah Goodman, senior manager of network development for the Holy Managed Care Company, has just returned from a lunch meeting with the adviser for the MHSA (Master’s of Health Services Administration)

program at State University, and now she is back on the job attending more meetings. At 1:30 p.m. she has a meeting to discuss pay issues. The Human Resources Department has evaluated the salary picture for the entire organization and is concerned that women are not being paid as well as men. They want input on a strategy to bring the pay issue into line so as to avoid a gender discrimination charge. Personally, Sarah wondered if she got paid as well as Dave, her counterpart in Tampa. Certainly she has been there as long and worked about twice as hard as he seems to! He does seem to benefit from the “good old boy network,” however.

At 3:00 there is a performance appraisal Sarah had scheduled with her assistant Maria. Sarah wasn’t sure what to do about Maria. Her work was terrific from the standpoint of accuracy and amount. As long as she got a pat on the back pretty frequently, Maria was an ideal employee in a lot of ways. Sarah knew that Maria would be prepared for the interview, including her goals for the next six months. The problem was that Sarah really wanted to get Maria more involved with others in the department. If she wasn’t able to get Maria ready to assume her position, how could Sarah ever hope to be promoted? Productive as she was, Maria just wasn’t a “people person.”

Then at 4:00, there is another performance appraisal scheduled. This one was going to be difficult.

Janine was a fairly new employee and Sarah loved the work she produced, but she didn’t think she’d ever seen a more uptight person! She seemed to need to be told at each step what to do next and worried constantly about breaking the rules. Sarah had begun to think Janine had even invented some new rules!

Last week, for example, Sarah had asked Janine to stay a little late to finish a project. She didn’t discover until the next day that Janine had been late picking up her baby from the babysitter. Certainly overtime wasn’t required, and Sarah felt bad about causing the problem. She could have asked someone else to do the work, but thought it might be a way of encouraging Janine to “get out of the box” a little. By the time the meetings were over, Sarah figured she’d just have time to return her phone calls and scan the mail before it was time to go home. She’d promised Richard something special for dinner, mostly because she was planning to tell him about graduate school. The traffic would be awful, and she needed to stop by the store on the way. “Oh well! It’s all in a day’s work,” she thought.

Discuss the various motivation theories reflected in this case study.