Critically evaluate the contention that performance management is subject to an inherent tension between management requirements to both control and develop their workforce.

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Critically evaluate the contention that performance management is subject to an inherent tension between management requirements to both control and develop their workforce.

Themes

Your literature review must focus on one of the following themes:

  • The relationship between employee engagement and organisational performance
  • HRM and employer branding
  • The role of performance management in both controlling and developing employees

These themes are intentionally broad, to allow students to focus on particular areas of interest. This means that you will need to think about which particular aspects of your chosen theme you would like to focus on and write your own title to reflect this. Guidance on this will be provided and you are strongly advised to agree your chosen focus and proposed title of your work with your lecturer. 

Selecting your own title within one of the above themes gives you the opportunity to tailor your literature review to a topic that is of particular interest to you

Some examples of titles that students have used successfully in the past are:

“Employee voice as antecedent of engagement and organisational performance”

“Human Resource Management and Employer Branding: When is word-of-mouth most effective in new employees’ attraction”

“The role of performance management in both controlling and developing employees: performance management & appraisal in creative environments”

 

 

 

What are the disadvantages of concurrent engineering ?

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1. How does the WBS differ from the project network?

2. How are WBS and project networks linked?

3. Why is slack important to the project manager?

4. What is the difference between free slack & total slack?

5. What is a hammock activity and when is it used?

6. Why is it important to identify the critical path before starting a project?

7. On what kind of projects would the critical path be irrelevant?

8. What are the disadvantages of concurrent engineering ? ( Fast Tracking )

9. What kinds of projects should avoid using concurrent engineering?

Demonstrate ability to relate theory to practice and to identify and proactively anticipate broader implications for selected issues across contexts.

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The Assessment Task

This assignment comprises two main deliverables, a Literature Review and a Concept of Operatons. These two parts are to be joined into a single, professional report by appropriate linking text.

  1. Conduct a literature review on the factors promoting and inhibiting participation in the Sharing Economy. Discuss the key concepts of Materialism and Planned Behaviour in the context of consumer goods. Your research should cover the company’s key markets of Japan and the USA and at least one emerging market, such as India. You may draw on relevant non-academic as well as academic sources to support your discussion, providing those sources are sufficiently authoritative. (60% of wordcount)
  2. Develop an outline concept of operations for the new business unit. Which market would you launch in first, and why? (40% of wordcount).

The word count limit for this assessment is 1800 words (+/- 10%). In line with normal practice, tables, figures, references and appendices are excluded from this word count.

Learning Outcomes

On successful completion of this assessment, you will be able to:

a.       Recognise, analyse and critically reflect on key concepts, managerial frameworks and techniques available to operations managers.
b.      Desmonstrate conceptual and practical understanding of the opportunities and constraints that organisational characteristics place on operations managers and on operational decision making in the supply chain context.
e.       Demonstrate ability to relate theory to practice and to identify and proactively anticipate broader implications for selected issues across contexts.

 

Your grade will depend on the extent to which you meet these learning outcomes in the way relevant for this assessment. Please see the grading rubric on NILE for further details of the criteria against which you will be assessed.

Assessment Support

Specific support sessions for this assessment will be provided by the module team and notified through NILE, You can also access individual support and guidance for your assessments from the Learning Development team. The Skills Hub is another useful source of online support for assessments and academic skills.

Academic Integrity and Misconduct

Unless this is a group assessment, the work you produce must be your own, with work taken from any other source properly referenced and attributed. For the avoidance of doubt this means that it is an infringement of academic integrity and, therefore, academic misconduct to ask someone else to carry out all or some of the work for you, whether paid or unpaid, or to use the work of another student whether current or previously submitted.

For further guidance on what constitutes plagiarism, contract cheating or collusion, or any other infringement of academic integrity, please read the University’s Academic Integrity and Misconduct Policy.  Also useful resources to help with understanding academic integrity are available from UNPAC .

N.B. The penalties for academic misconduct are severe and can include failing the assessment, failing the module and expulsion from the university.

Assessment Submission

To submit your work, please go to the ‘Submit your work’ area on the NILE site and use the relevant submission point to upload your report. The deadline for this is 11.59pm (UK local time) on the date of submission. Please note that essays and text based reports should be submitted as word documents and not PDFs or Mac files.

Written work submitted to TURNITIN will be subject to anti-plagiarism detection software.  Turnitin checks student work for possible textual matches against internet available resources and its own proprietary database. Work

 

When you upload your work correctly to TURNITIN you will receive a receipt which is your record and proof of submission.  If your assessment is not submitted to TURNITIN, rather than a receipt, you will see a green banner at the top of the screen that denotes successful submission.

 

N.B Work emailed directly to your tutor will not be marked.

Late submission of work

For first sits, if an item of assessment is submitted late and an extension has not been granted, the following will apply:

 

  • Within one week of the original deadline – work will be marked and returned with full feedback, and awarded a maximum bare pass grade.
  • More than one week from original deadline – grade achievable LG (L indicating late).

 

For resits there are no allowances for work submitted late and it will be treated as a non-submission.

 

Please see the Assessment and Feedback Policy for full information on the processes related to assessment, grading and feedback.  You will also find the generic grading criteria for achievement at  University Grading Criteria.  Also explained there are the meanings of the various G grades at the bottom of the grading scale including LG mentioned above.

 

Extensions

The University of Northampton’s general policy with regard to extensions is to be supportive of students who have genuine difficulties, but not against pressures of work that could have reasonably been anticipated.

 

For full details please refer to the Extensions Policy.  Extensions are only available for first sits – they are not available for resits.

 

Mitigating Circumstances

For guidance on Mitigating circumstances please go to Mitigating Circumstances where you will find detailed guidance on the policy as well as guidance and the form for making an application.

 

Please note, however, that an application to defer an assessment on the grounds of mitigating circumstances should normally be made in advance of the submission deadline or examination date.

 

Feedback and Grades

These can be accessed through clicking on the Feedback and Grades tab on NILE. Feedback will be provided by a rubric with summary comments

Present organizational structure recommendations for your employer or for a different organization with which you are familiar.

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For this assignment, you will present organizational structure recommendations for your employer or for a different organization with which you are familiar. Choose an organization that is not yet global, and then prepare a 15-minute presentation using PowerPoint (about 10-15 slides) on your organizational structure recommendations (global, mixed, transnational, subsidiary, export, or others) and why you are making these recommendations. Be sure to incorporate concepts, such as communication or global strategy, from Units 1 and 2 into your presentation.

Slide Number Slide Topic
1 Title
2 Introduction of Selected Company
3 Review of Globalization and Impact on Selected Company
4 Review of Global Organizational Structure Type
5 Review of Mixed Organizational Structure Type
6 Review of Transnational Structure Type
7 Review of Subsidiary Structure Type
8 Review of Export Structure Type
9 Presentation and Justification of Selected Organizational Structure
10 Structure for Selected Company of Selected Organizational Structure
11 Potential Barriers to Implementation (e.g., Social, Cultural, Economic, Political, and Others)
12 Role of Operations Managers in Selected Structure
13 Corporate Social Responsibility in Selected Structure
14 Methods and Tools in Selected Structure (e.g., Capacity Planning, Quality Tracking, Forecasting
15 References

Demonstrate how you can partner with the executive team to turn this situation around and help the company be more competitive.

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As the new HR manager of a jewelry company, you have put together some preliminary reports for the CEO. One of the reports you compiled focuses on employee turnover. The jewelry company is an organization with aggressive expansion goals. In the last 2 years, the company has continually hired new employees, yet it has not achieved the staffing levels it desired. The company knew that some employees had left the organization, but turnover rates have not been formally tracked.

After your preliminary fact-finding, you were surprised to discover that the turnover rate for the past year was 38%. You know the CEO will not be pleased with this turnover rate, and you have made the decision to prepare yourself more before presenting the report to the CEO. Turnover presents a significant cost for an organization, so you recognize that this will be an opportunity for you to demonstrate how you can partner with the executive team to turn this situation around and help the company be more competitive. Prepare a short presentation for the CEO on the situation and possible reasons as to why employees are leaving at such a high rate.

As you are preparing your presentation, consider the following:
In detail, discuss several of the reasons why employees tend to leave organizations.
You plan to present the financial impact to the CEO to get a real sense of the significance of the situation. What factors will you consider in preparing this financial estimate? For this assignment, you are not required to determine the actual dollar figure, but instead, you are to consider what would contribute to the cost of turnover.
Being proactive, what measures can be taken to assess the morale of current employees, and how likely they are to leave or stay?
What process do you recommend for partnering with the management team to reduce turnover in the upcoming years?
As you consider your role, how will you position this to the CEO to demonstrate the value you can bring to addressing this problem?

Explore the impact of mergers and acquisitions on employee motivation

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To investigate the impact of mergers and acquisitions on employee motivation in an oil and gas company in the North-East of Scotland
Objectives
Analyse the challenges resulting from M&A activity
Explore the relevant theories / aspects of mergers and acquisitions;
Explore the impact of mergers and acquisitions on employee motivation

Justification of research topic
Due to the oil and gas downturn and the current COVID pandemic, there has been a decline in the oil and gas revenue. To remain competitive, increasingly companies are merging or acquiring businesses offering a different solution.
Despite the attention mergers and acquisition have received from financial and marketing strategists, evidence suggests merger failure rate remains as high as ever.
In light of the current wave of merger activities within the oil and gas industry, it seems an appropriate time to consider explanations of merger failure and assess the contribution of human factors to the success or failure of the M&A process in the workplace. Whilst some studies exist which contribute to the elucidation of the issues regarding mergers, the researcher believes it is important to explore the relationship with job satisfaction and how to manage mergers in reducing conflict in the workplace. These conflicts if not properly managed my result in loss of morale, employee dissatisfaction, loss of productivity and even increased Quality and safety incidents and so needs to be addressed.
This study may be of benefit to managers, change agents, people manager team, strategy and planning team to strengthen future M&A strategy to cater for and incorporate elements of human factors during change in order to improve the M&A success rate.

 

What organizational structure, do you think is best equipped to deal with this? Is it hierarchical, projectized, matrix?

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This discussion builds on previous discusiion99 on the need for frequent value delivery in a tech environment.

Organization of the future!

Last week we talked about the intense global demands of tech projects. The need for rapid value delivery through managing high-risk, and highly dependency projects. What organizational structure, do you think is best equipped to deal with this? Is it hierarchical, projectized, matrix? Or is it something entirely different?

What is the total cost of the project? What is included in the cost? What percentage of that cost are the project overheads?

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Individual report (500 words) supported by one MS Project file

  1. Assignment Title: Charity Marathon PID (Part 2: Project Schedule and Budget)
  2. Description of the assignment:
  • This assignment is based on a fictitious project described in the Charity Marathon PID document. Your task is to construct the project schedule in a form of a
    • resourced Gantt chart showing the project duration, the milestones and resourcing conflicts and then to apply levelling to produce
    • (ii) a final Gantt chart without resource conflicts.

the following three files must be created :

  1. One MS Projectfiles including a schedule of the Promotion project in a form of a levelled Gantt chart, showing the critical tasks, the total slack, all allocated resources, the cost breakdown across different types of resources;
  2. one MS Word document to include one-page Executive summary with answers to the following:
    1. Assumingthat the (promotion) project starts on 12/04/2021, that a week comprises 5 working days and that UK holidays allowances apply, what is the earliest date when the project will be finished?
    2. Which activities cannot be delayed if the project is to be finished at its earliest possible date? How can the PM ensure that these activities can be completed on time?
  • What is the total cost of the project? What is included in the cost? What percentage of that cost are the project overheads? Is the cost within the allowance that enables the project objectives to be met? If not, how it could be reduced?
  1. If the project needs to be completed 2 days earlier, what would be the impact on the cost?

The report should have maximum 1 page  (excluding the title page).

All references should follow the Harvard style of referencing

 

Identify similarities and differences between servant leadership philosophies and the values from your selected cultural context and religious viewpoint.

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The purpose of this assignment is to examine servant leadership practices with regard to religions and cultures other than those associated with Christianity.

While servant leadership is often associated with Christianity and the Bible, one could argue that it is compatible with most religions and philosophies and that it transcends cultures.

This assignment presents you with an opportunity to explore other cultures, philosophies, and religions and asks you to think critically about how servant leadership practices are apparent in other religions and cultures.

First, begin by selecting and examining one cultural context and one religious viewpoint outside of mainstream Christianity. Then in a 1,250 to 1,500 word essay, discuss the following:

Explain how the principles of servant leadership are evident in your chosen culture and religion?
Identify similarities and differences between servant leadership philosophies and the values from your selected cultural context and religious viewpoint.
Identify specific examples of servant leadership practices evident in your chosen culture and religion in your essay.
You are required to locate a total of four articles that address servant leadership in your chosen cultural context and religious viewpoint. Two of the articles should examine servant leadership from a different cultural perspective and two articles should examine servant leadership from a different religious perspective. The articles must be peer reviewed and have been published within the last 5 years. You must use and cite the articles within each content area in your paper to strengthen your claims.

Prepare this assignment according to the guidelines found in the APA Style Guide, located in the Student Success Center.