W-Home is a homeowner's insurance firm in Wonderland. The firm hires 200 clerical workers to handle insurance claims. Each employee handles a single task within the insurance claim process. For example, some employees take the insurance claim calls, some employees divide the cases by accident types, some employees calculate the insurance claim amount, some employees prepare the documents, etc. There are five line managers supervising the clerical employees. Their pay was about the average for secretarial and clerical jobs in Wonderland. Their salaries are adjusted yearly across the board for inflation. There was also a year-end bonus that can range from 0 to 30 percent of their yearly salary. The year-end bonus was determined by the total number of insurance claims that the company has handled in a given year.

According to the line managers, the biggest complaint that the clerical workers have is their work environment. The offices for the clerical workers are in ten separate buildings side-by-side. These buildings were used to be private houses and are about 120 years old. The heating and air conditioning do not work well, and they often get too warm in the summer and too cold in the winter. The office space is small and cramped with the bathrooms being unclean. There is no cafeteria, and the workers have to bring lunch from their home. There are also only few parking spaces in the building, and many employees have a hard time finding parking spaces nearby. The line managers consider this poor work environment as the cause for the low level of job satisfaction and motivation of clerical workers. They have asked the management to take actions to address the problem for the last ten years.

After having enough complaints from the clerical workers and their line managers, the management of W-home has decided to purchase a new office building for the clerical workers. The building is brand new and can accommodate all the clerical workers and line managers. All the workers now have their working spaces in a large, bright, and temperature controlled room. The building also has a cafeteria with a great list of menus each day. The bathrooms are clean with all the state-of-the-art features. The building also has a large parking lot that can accommodate all the cars of the employees.

For the first two months after moving to the new office, the clerical employees seemed excited, and their job satisfaction has increased. But after these two months, the results were disappointing. Job satisfaction, absenteeism, turnover, production quality, errors, and worker complaints all went back to the level that they used to be in the times of the old buildings (and this level seems somewhat problematic considering the average in the industry). No employees complain about cramped workspaces and dirty bathrooms anymore, but complaints about work stress, work hours (which are the same as before), etc., are common.

1. The management of W-Home has hired you as the company's management consultant. The management has presented the above case to you and is asking for a solution to fix the problem that the company is having with its clerical workers. Since it seems that the poor work environment wasn't the real cause of the problem, the management is asking for some suggestions in the changes of the company's work structure and pay system for its clerical workers.

W-rite a report to the management of W-Home In this report, explain what might be the cause of the problem and why you think that way. Then, suggest a solution to fix the problem. In doing this, you MUST use the concepts from the Job Characteristics Theory and the Expectancy Theory