MBAX 6005 Week 7 Two-Frame Applied Assignment Example

The Refund Backlog Read Twice: Call Center Morale Through the Human Resource Frame and an Approval Rule in the Wrong Place Through the Structural Frame, With Remedies Scored Side by Side

Student Name

Walden University

MBAX 6005: Organizational Perspectives and Implications for Leaders

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

The Refund Backlog Read Twice: Call Center Morale Through the Human Resource Frame and an Approval Rule in the Wrong Place Through the Structural Frame, With Remedies Scored Side by Side

The Situation

At Riverbend, the invented transit system this course follows, riders charged twice by slow fare validators during the contactless launch must call the customer service center for a refund. The process runs as follows. An agent logs each double charge as a ticket with the rider's card number and trip times. Tickets go to the finance department, which reviews and approves refunds once a month in a single batch. Approved refunds reach riders' accounts five to ten days later. In the meantime, riders call back, often several times, to ask where their money is. In the spring the backlog reached about 2,300 open tickets, and the share of calls that were repeat calls about a pending refund rose to roughly a quarter of the call center's volume. Agent turnover in the center that quarter was the highest the agency had recorded.

The Human Resource Reading

The call center's managers described the problem as morale. Agents told supervisors they felt "useless" and "yelled at for something I can't fix." The human resource frame of Bolman and Deal (2017) starts from whether an organization serves its people and whether its jobs suit the people in them. The job characteristics model of Hackman and Oldham (1976) offers a more precise tool. It names five core job dimensions, autonomy and feedback among them, and ties each to how motivated and satisfied workers feel.

Applied to the refund calls, the model points to one dimension in particular: autonomy. Before the fare launch, agents handled most rider problems themselves, issuing a replacement card or crediting a missed transfer on the spot. For double charges they could do nothing but log a ticket and apologize. The task also lost identity, since agents never saw a refund through, and feedback, since they never learned whether a refund had been paid. On this reading, the remedy is to restore autonomy: give agents authority to issue refunds up to a limit on the call, perhaps $20, which covers almost every double charge.

The Structural Reading

The structural frame reads the same backlog differently. Here the problem is where refund authority sits. Approval lives in finance, several steps away from the agent holding the call, and it runs on a monthly cycle designed for vendor invoices rather than for small rider credits. The backlog is what a batch process produces when demand arrives continuously. Galbraith (1974) argued that decisions should be made where the information to make them sits, or else the organization must pay to move the information up. The agent has the card number, the trip times and the rider on the line; finance has a monthly report. On this reading, the remedy is to move refund authority for small amounts to the call center, with finance auditing a sample afterward rather than approving each one in advance.

Remedies Scored Side by Side

The two remedies look similar, since both put refund authority closer to the agent, but they are justified differently and would be designed differently. Table 1 compares them.

The structural remedy repairs more of both frames' symptoms. It clears the backlog directly, which ends repeat calls, and in doing so it gives agents the autonomy the human resource reading found missing. The human resource remedy, applied without the structural change, risks telling agents they have more responsibility while the approval rule still sits in finance. Breadth of repair favors the structural reading here. It is also cheaper to sustain, since it needs one audit routine rather than ongoing supervisor review of each agent's refunds.

Table 1

Comparing the Two Remedies

Composite organization.

What Each Frame Notices That the Other Misses

The human resource frame noticed something the structural frame would have missed: the turnover cost. Losing experienced agents during the spring made the backlog worse, since new agents took longer to log tickets correctly. The structural frame noticed something the human resource frame would have missed: that a monthly batch built for invoices is the wrong tool for small, continuous refunds. Bolman and Deal (2017) recommend reframing precisely because each frame directs attention to different facts.

Recommendation

Move approval for refunds under $25 to the call center, with finance auditing a random tenth of them each month. Present the change to agents as restoring their ability to solve riders' problems, so the human resource gain is recognized rather than left implicit.

References

Bolman, L. G., & Deal, T. E. (2017). Reframing organizations: Artistry, choice, and leadership (6th ed.). Jossey-Bass.

Galbraith, J. R. (1974). Organization design: An information processing view. Interfaces, 4(3), 28-36. https://doi.org/10.1287/inte.4.3.28

Hackman, J. R., & Oldham, G. R. (1976). Motivation through the design of work: Test of a theory. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 16(2), 250-279. https://doi.org/10.1016/0030-5073(76)90016-7