Appraising the secretaries at sweetwater u case study ppt

Answer the questions to the case, "Appraising the Secretaries at Sweetwater U," at the end of Chapter 6. Include at least one outside source supporting your answers. Explain your answers in 200 words.

Case Incident: Appraising the Secretaries at Sweetwater U
Rob Winchester, newly appointed vice president for administrative affairs at Sweetwater State University, faced a tough problem shortly after hisuniversity career began. Three weeks after he came on board in September, Sweetwater’s president, Rob’s boss, told Rob that one of his first tasks was to improve the appraisal system used to evaluate secretarial and clerical performance at Sweetwater U. The main difficulty was that theperformance appraisal was tied to salary increases given at the end of the year. Therefore, most administrators were less than accurate whenthey used the graphic rating forms that were the basis of the clerical staff evaluation. Each administrator simply rated his or her clerk or secretary as “excellent.” This cleared the way for all support staff to receive a maximum pay increase every year.

But the current university budget simply did not include enough money to fund another “maximum” annual increase for every staffer. Furthermore, Sweetwater’s president felt that the custom of providing invalid performance feedback to each secretary was not productive, so he had asked the new vice president to revise the system. In October, Rob sent a memo to all administrators telling them that in the future no more than half the secretaries reporting to any particular administrator could be appraised as “excellent.” This move, in effect, forced each supervisor to begin ranking his or her secretaries for quality of performance. The vice president’s memo met widespread resistance immediately—from administrators, who were afraid that many of their secretaries would leave for lucrative jobs; and from secretaries, who felt that the new system was unfair. A handful of secretaries had begun quietly picketing outside the president’s home on the university campus. The picketing, caustic remarks by disgruntled administrators, and rumors of an impending slowdown by the secretaries (there were about 250 on campus) made Rob Winchester wonder whether he had made the right decision by setting up forced ranking. He knew, however, that there were a few performance appraisal experts in the School of Business, so he set up an appointment with them to discuss the matter.