Question 1a

Management by objectives (MBO) is a useful tool in motivating and controlling employees at work. Assuming that you are a sales manager of an insurance company supervising a group of young insurance agents who have just joined the workforce, how would you apply the MBO approach in your work? Explain in four steps and justifiable examples are provided to support each step.

(1) Goal specificity: specific and measurable performance goals could be determined between managers and salesperson (e.g. Weekly, monthly sales, the number of sales phone calls made by salespersons).

(2) Participative decision making: salespersons could collaboratively set these specific goals with their managers. Action plans on achieving goals are specified (e.g. what activities to be launched) and agreed upon by managers and employees.

(3) Explicit performance and evaluation period: Progress could be reviewed every week and month and overall performance could be evaluated annually.

(4) Feedback: Feedback could be provided to enable all members to keep track of their progress towards the mutually agreed upon goals and make necessary actions to ensure their accomplishment. Successful accomplishment will be reinforced by rewards (e.g. Sales bonus, higher sales commission).

Question 1b

Identify a previous decision you made that had important unintended consequences. Were the consequences good, bad or both? By making use of the eight-step decision making process on decision making, should you and could you have done anything differently in making the decision? Discuss and and justifiable examples are provided to support each step.

1. Identifying a problem

2. Identifying decision criteria

3. Allocating weights to the criteria

4. Developing alternatives

5. Analyzing alternatives

6. Selecting an alternative

7. Implementing the alternative

8. Evaluating the decision's effectiveness