MGT 300 ch 13

According to the expectancy theory, ____ affect the conscious choices that people make about their motivation.

____ is the extent to which goals are detailed, exact, and unambiguous.

Users of credit and debit cards that earn the owners money or rewards towards future purchases, is an example of _______.

The number of people who play high-stakes poker is increasing as a result of a number of cable television shows featuring professional poker players vying for $100,000 pots. In terms of reinforcement theory, what kind of a reinforcement schedule motivates the behavior of these card players?

For punishment to work (i.e., to weaken the frequency of undesirable behaviors without creating a backlash), the punishment must be strong enough to stop the undesired behavior and must be administered ____. Answer

____ is a reinforcement strategy which weakens a behavior over time because the behavior has no consequences, positive or negative.

The primary ways to create reinforcement contingencies in organizations are ____.

n equity theory, ____ refers to the fairness of the process used to make reward allocation decisions.

France has 14 million smokers. More importantly, smokers in France are closely associated with the French culture. To reduce the number of smokers in the nation, the French government has increased the costs of cigarettes to a price twenty times greater than that charged in any other nation in the European Union. In terms of reinforcement theory, what kind of a reinforcement schedule is being used?

Wegmans, a supermarket chained based in the northeast United States, has been in business since 1915. Its founder believes that if the company could survive the Great Depression, it can survive the intense competition of today's grocery industry, fueled, of course, by Wal-Mart. The grocery business has margins between 2 and 4 percent. Plus, because of low pay, long hours, and, frankly, a mundane industry that doesn't attract and keep top-notch talent, employee turnover averages 100 percent per year. In fact, turnover costs are so high and profit margins are so low (because of intense competition) that over the last 13 years, 13,500 individual grocery stores, 17 percent in all, have closed because they weren't profitable. Wegmans plans to beat those odds by differentiating itself through service. Providing great service requires a highly educated, motivated work force, and accomplishing that won't be easy. The first step in Wegmans' plan to recruit a highly motivated work force is to offer workers excellent medical, dental, and life insurance as well as long-term disability coverage. Everyone who makes less than $55,000 a year receives complete medical insurance and a 401(k) retirement plan in which every employee dollar is matched by 50 cents from Wegmans. In addition to benefits for full-time workers, part-time workers such as cashiers and baggers, most of whom are high-school students, can earn a scholarship bonus (for good grades) of $6,000 over their four years of high school. In fact, Wegmans has given 17,500 full- and part-time employees $54 million for college scholarships over the last 20 years. Wegmans also pays some of the highest salaries in the grocery industry, which, combined with the company's benefits package, keeps Wegmans' turnover rate at an astronomically low 6%! Wegmans also invests in its employees through training. Employees must pass 30- to 55-hour long training classes before they can work in the meat or fish departments. And some are sent to Italy to learn about cheeses or to France to work in patisseries (pasty shops). Produce employees might be sent to California to learn from strawberry growers. At Wegmans, the motto is "Employees first, customers second." But because Wegmans' employees are so satisfied with their work and because the company invests so heavily in them, they are glad to deliver what Wegmans calls "telepathic levels of customer service." In pursuit of "telepathic" customer service, employees are allowed, even encouraged, to do anything they need to do to satisfy customers - and that's without getting approval from their managers. In fact, Wegman chefs have gone to customers' homes to fix incorrect food orders. When a customer purchased a Thanksgiving turkey too large for her oven, a Wegmans' employee cooked it for her in the large ovens at the store. Bill Gamer, a part-time employee in a meat department, said, "They let me do whatever comes into my head, which is kind of scary sometimes." Jack DePeters, head of company operations concurs, saying, "We're a $3 billion company run by 16-year-old cashiers." Refer to Wegmans. Paying high salaries and offering a generous benefits package indicate that Wegmans is using needs theory and satisfying ____ needs.

are the cause-and-effect relationships between the performance of specific behaviors and specific consequences.

According to Don Vlcek, a former Domino's Pizza vice president, "To achieve results, you've got to properly define the goal—and that's not always easy. Vague goals are worthless. But 'increase productivity by 12 percent within three weeks'—that is a clear, useful goal." Vlcek is discussing ____.

A manufacturer of modular housing gives each employee a monthly $300 bonus if he or she is neither absent nor late to work for the entire month. There are no excused absences. The loss of a bonus by a parent with an emergency hospitalization of a child is an example of the use of ____.

The three components of ____ are initiation of effort, direction of effort, and persistence of effort.

According to the text, ____ is the set of forces that initiates, directs, and makes people persist in their efforts to accomplish a goal.

Because workplace injuries cost U.S. businesses $1 billion every week, increased safety compliance needs to become a practice, not just a theory. The goal of developing safety consciousness within the workforce requires continuous reinforcement at every organizational level. This means ____.

Currently the U.S. Olympic Committee pays Olympic athletes for each medal earned. gold medal, $15,000 for a silver medal, and $10,000 for a bronze medal. Since 1960, the Paralympics for disabled athletes has been a part of the Olympic Games, yet the USOC pays disabled athletes only 10 percent of what the Olympic athletes are paid, and Paralympic athletes are not allowed to participate in opening ceremonies. Paralympic athletes are angry at being treated unfairly. To achieve perceived equity, the Paralympic athletes are suing the USOC for larger rewards. Paralympic athletes have decided to deal with the inequity by ____.

According to a survey done on teaching evaluations, engineering students consider the improvement of teaching to be the most important outcome of the evaluation process. For engineering students who believe their efforts will lead to better teaching, the motivation to fill out a teaching evaluation would have a ____.

For workers who feel underpaid, creating a union at their place of employment to attain higher wages can be a mechanism for restoring equity by ____.

According to a survey done on teaching evaluations, students' motivation to participate in teaching evaluations is impacted significantly by their expectation that they will be able to provide meaningful feedback. In other words, if they are going to expend the thought and effort to fill out evaluation forms, (1) Is the form designed to gather meaningful information? and (2) Do the students have enough information to form a meaningful opinion about the instruction? In terms of expectancy theory, students are concerned with ____, or whether it is worth their efforts.