MLDR 6010 Week 11 Final Management Paper Example

Two People, Two Decisions, One Standard: A Final Management Paper on a Lead Technician Appointment and a Veterinarian's Conduct, Written So Each Person Could Read Their Own Section

Student Name

Walden University

MLDR 6010: Managing People and Promoting

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Two People, Two Decisions, One Standard: A Final Management Paper on a Lead Technician Appointment and a Veterinarian's Conduct, Written So Each Person Could Read Their Own Section

Introduction

As practice manager of one clinic in a composite seven-clinic veterinary group near Columbus, I made two decisions about people this term. One appointed a lead technician and passed over the clinic's most admired senior technician. The other set a response to a veterinarian whose conduct in surgery had preceded three technician resignations. This paper is organized by decision rather than by week, and it holds itself to one standard: each section should be something the person it concerns could read in full and find every conclusion followed by the evidence beneath it. Earlier weekly work is condensed and corrected here, and where later weeks overturned an earlier conclusion, the correction is stated.

The Lead Technician Appointment

The standard came first. Late surgery starts on 19 of 38 surgery days in one quarter had a single common cause: nobody owned the treatment board. Critical incidents from thirteen staff, gathered with the episode-based interviewing that Flanagan (1954) introduced, showed what separated good mornings from bad ones: someone took the board early, rebuilt the plan when people called out and stayed off the surgery floor until the plan was announced. From those incidents came six requirements, four needed on day one. Two informal preferences, long tenure and popularity with the team, were dropped because no incident supported them, and the drops were recorded.

The evidence came second. Three candidates completed a forty-minute work sample on a real Tuesday's board altered to include a double booking, a sick call and a kennel assistant waiting for direction. Work samples built from a job's real content are among the stronger predictors of performance (Roth et al., 2005). The medical director, a lead technician from another clinic and I each rated every candidate against anchors written before applications were opened, and only then discussed our ratings. Two ratings moved in discussion, one of them lowering Kelsey's score on rebuilding the schedule, because her fix for the double booking took her into a procedure and away from the board for twenty minutes.

The choice came third. Andrea was appointed because she alone rebuilt the day, assigned staff within their training and stayed at the board throughout. Kelsey, the floor's favorite, was the strongest clinician of the three and had the best logs; on the role's two most important tasks, she was the weakest. Benson et al. (2019) found that organizations routinely promote their best individual performers into roles whose work is different, and that those promoted performers then manage less well. The appointment was an attempt not to repeat that pattern.

Kelsey's appraisal, written a week later, rated her current role, not the lead role. A first draft let the selection leak in twice, through a halo that raised her teamwork rating and a leniency that softened a rushed discharge. The appraisal itself lists both fixes. The feedback conversation gave her the decision in its first two sentences and then two items from the exercise, each stated as situation, behavior and impact. It accepted the part of her objection I could not verify, whether the dental patient was ready, and held to the part all three panelists saw. The development plan that followed paired each of her commitments with one of the clinic's, and writing the clinic's half first reduced her Saturday board days from four a month to two, because the schedule could not cover more.

What would change this decision: evidence that the work sample misrepresented the role, for example if Andrea's first six months show the board running no better than before; or a second exercise at the plan's final review in which Kelsey meets every anchor, in which case she should be the first candidate considered for the next opening in the chain.

The Conduct Response

The standard came first here too, though it arrived later than it should have. My Week 7 analysis priced four responses, from written expectations with coaching to doing nothing, for every affected party. Filling every cell of that table revealed a party I had overlooked: the staff of the clinic that would have received Dr. Haines had he been moved. I chose coaching with written expectations, adding interviews to separate verified events from reports, and I stated openly that the technicians would bear most of the cost while coaching ran its course.

The evidence then corrected the choice. Checking the proposal against the handbook clause by clause showed that what I had called a statement of expectations was, under the handbook's own definition, a written warning. Calling it anything else would have skipped regional HR's review and his right to respond in writing. The proposal changed to a written warning, reviewed by HR, with coaching as a separate step. Ball et al. (1994) found that discipline seen as procedurally fair was followed by better performance than discipline seen as arbitrary, so the correction protects the outcome as well as the process.

The choice that stands is a written warning describing the two incidents I saw, issued after HR review, followed by three months of coaching and a review at ninety days, with technicians told that action has been taken and given a route to report future incidents directly.

What would change this decision: verified conduct more serious than shouting, a further incident I observe or another resignation that names him during the coaching period. Any of these leads to a formal referral.

Equity Across Both Decisions

The equity review substituted a different person into each decision while holding the facts constant. The selection held up: swapping in a part-timer of equal skill changed nothing, since she would have sat the same exercise against the same anchors. The conduct response did not. The chain's corrective action log showed four technicians referred straight to the formal process in two years for conduct comparable to or milder than Dr. Haines's, and no veterinarian referred at all. Under the consistency test in Leventhal (1980), the response failed.

The fix was a threshold rule applied by conduct rather than role: two observed incidents of conduct the handbook prohibits lead to a written warning with HR review for anyone, and a further incident leads to formal referral. Dr. Haines's outcome does not change under the rule, but its justification does, and the next technician in his position will be treated the same way. Colquitt et al. (2001) found that people's trust in authorities depends heavily on whether procedures and explanations are fair; a rule that applies by conduct is easier to explain to the technicians who stayed than a decision that happens to favor a surgeon.

Reflection on My Own Judgment

One of my calls was not supported by the evidence at the time I made it. In Week 7, I chose coaching before checking how the chain had handled comparable conduct by technicians. I believed I was choosing coaching because Dr. Haines had never been warned. The equity review suggests his surgical revenue and seniority were also doing work in my reasoning that I had not written down. Badaracco (1997) argues that defining moments test whether a manager's stated values match the ones her choices reveal; mine did not match fully, and the threshold rule is my attempt to make them match.

The appointment decision taught the opposite lesson. Writing the standard before meeting the candidates felt bureaucratic in Week 2, and it was the only thing that let me explain the outcome to Kelsey without saying anything I could not show her.

References

Badaracco, J. L. (1997). Defining moments: When managers must choose between right and right. Harvard Business School Press.

Ball, G. A., Trevino, L. K., & Sims, H. P. (1994). Just and unjust punishment: Influences on subordinate performance and citizenship. Academy of Management Journal, 37(2), 299-322. https://doi.org/10.5465/256831

Benson, A., Li, D., & Shue, K. (2019). Promotions and the Peter principle. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 134(4), 2085-2134. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjz022

Colquitt, J. A., Conlon, D. E., Wesson, M. J., Porter, C. O. L. H., & Ng, K. Y. (2001). Justice at the millennium: A meta-analytic review of 25 years of organizational justice research. Journal of Applied Psychology, 86(3), 425-445. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.86.3.425

Flanagan, J. C. (1954). The critical incident technique. Psychological Bulletin, 51(4), 327-358. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0061470

Leventhal, G. S. (1980). What should be done with equity theory? New approaches to the study of fairness in social relationships. In K. J. Gergen, M. S. Greenberg, & R. H. Willis (Eds.), Social exchange: Advances in theory and research (pp. 27-55). Plenum Press.

Roth, P. L., Bobko, P., & McFarland, L. A. (2005). A meta-analysis of work sample test validity: Updating and integrating some classic literature. Personnel Psychology, 58(4), 1009-1037. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2005.00714.x