You are the supervisor of the bed and bath department of a large department store. As supervisor, you are in charge of overseeing seven employees whose ages range from 16 to 20 years old. For the most part, you work alongside these employees, but you are also responsible for typical managerial duties (assigning tasks, creating the schedules, etc.). 

As a department, you are all responsible for ordering, stocking, cleaning, and maintaining several aisles of the store. These aisles focus on sheets, blankets, pillows, towels, soaps, shower supplies, and a number of other bedroom and bathroom-related products. Recently, two issues have been brought to your attention. One issue is in the backroom (off the salesfloor) while the other issue is on the salesfloor. 

As part of their job, your employees are required to operate heavy machinery in the backroom of the store. In particular, they operate a ‘power-jack’; an electrically powered pallet jack used for moving heavy pallets, and a ‘high-stacker’; a type of forklift which can be used to raise and lower pallets to and from high places (think of Costco racks for example). These machines are used to move, stack, and store merchandise that isn’t on the sales floor. While operating these machines, employees are required to wear heavy steel-toed boots as pallets have been known to fall on peoples’ feet and injure them severely. 

Because these boots are quite heavy, most employees leave a pair in the backroom rather than wearing them for their entire shift. It was brought to your attention that some of your employees are not wearing the proper shoes when operating the machinery. They claim they know what they are doing and that it is a waste of time to have to stop and change shoes just to move a pallet a few feet. Another part of their job involves hourly sweeps of the product aisles. In order to maintain a certain level of cleanliness as well as to prevent customer accidents and injury, employees are expected to sweep each aisle with a gigantic broom every hour. 

Once the sweep has been done, employees must write the current time and date and then sign their names to a sheet stating that they swept the aisles. Employees usually take turns with these hourly sweeps. However, it was brought to your attention that some of your employees are simply signing the sheet and not sweeping the aisles. It has been your experience that in most cases, the sweep does very little as your department does not often get that messy. You know from experience that your employees are only doing things that you might have done before you became supervisor, but as a supervisor, you need to ensure that everyone is following the rules. You don’t want to fire anyone, but something has to be done to make sure nobody gets hurt or so that you don’t get fired for allowing this behavior to continue.

QUESTION 1. What combination of reinforcement, punishment, and extinction could you use to correct these behaviors? What does social cognitive theory suggest that you should or could do to correct the behaviors?

Over the past few decades there have been numerous studies that have looked into how the information contained within a resume can influence a job applicant’s chance of receiving a job interview and subsequent job offer.  One recent study found that job applicants who used what are considered ‘improper’ email addresses were far less likely to receive an interview or a job offer than other applicants.

QUESTIONS

1. Use the perceptual model as presented by Bruner in Chapter Three to explain why applicants whose email address was considered ‘improper’ might be less likely to receive interviews and job offers.  

Refer to the different kinds of perceptual bias that were also discussed in this chapter.  Are any of those biases relevant to this case?