MGMT 461 Term Paper Instructions

Instructions

In this paper, you will conduct an audit of a company regarding one chosen topic, identify strengths and weaknesses, and provide recommendations based on your analysis. Here are the stages you should follow:

1. Find an organization to study. I recommend using your personal network when approaching a company. You will need to conduct three interviews with current employees of this organization. It is preferable that one of these three employees is an HR employee. The interviewees need to be knowledgeable about the topic you study. Note that having all interviewees from the HR department is not necessarily a good strategy, as their view of performance management and reward systems is often more positive relative to that in other departments.
2. Choose a topic. Topics are listed below. Also, your chosen topic should fit the organization in question. For example, if you are studying incentives, you should study an organization that actually uses incentives. If your topic is performance management, the company in question must have a structured performance management system in place.

List of Topics:

• Performance management (Describe their performance evaluation system in detail, and provide a critique of strengths and limitations of the system, along with your theory based recommendations).
• Incentives (Describe the incentive systems in place in the company, provide a critique of strengths and limitations, along with your theory based recommendations.)
• Benefits (Describe the discretionary benefits in place in the company as it is experienced by employees, provide a critique of strengths and limitations, along with your theory based recommendations.)

3. Master your topic. In the final report, your job is to describe what the company is doing right and what they can do better with respect to your chosen topic and provide recommendations. In other words, your entire report will consist of a description of the company’s activities (obtained from your three interviews and any other publicly available information about the company) and your recommendations. Before you go to the interviews, you need to master your topic so that you can create smart and meaningful questions. Start by reading the relevant sections from the book. I would also encourage you to read additional articles on the topic from outlets such as Harvard Business Review, SHRM website, Workforce, People Management etc.

4. Develop a list of questions. Your questions should attempt to uncover the strengths and weaknesses of your chosen company in your topic of study. The purpose of these questions is to see whether the company is doing the things identified in your literature review, as well as what this company is doing right, and what can be improved. Avoid asking for sensitive or confidential information.
5. Research the company through interviews and other sources. You need to interview at least three employees of your chosen company. In addition, you may gather relevant information through the company’s website, news articles, and any other sources.

Make sure that the responses of your interviewees are strictly held confidential. Do not attempt to gather information through surveys or via e-mail. Surveys do not give you the opportunity to expand on the answers and tend to contain brief responses, which leads to a superficial analysis of the organization of interest. Instead, I would like you to talk to the people in question and ask further questions to clarify answers.

6. Write up the paper. The paper should be around 12-15 pages, excluding the references and appendix. Use size 12 times new roman, with 1 inch of margins on all sides. (Double spaced)

Paper Format

Your paper should roughly have the following outline:

• Title page: Include the title of your paper, and names, and e-mail addresses of all your team members.
• Executive summary: Instead of a conclusion, your paper should include an executive summary. The summary is limited to 1-2 pages (double spaced) and should give the reader a short synopsis of your findings and your recommendations.
• Introduction: Provide an overview of your paper. This section should summarize the outline you will follow in the paper. (about 1 page). 
• Company Information: Provide an overview of the company, and describe how you collected the information. Here, you should introduce the people you interviewed (their job titles, position, tenure, etc.) while at the same time protecting their identity. (less than 1 page) 10 points.
• Findings: Describe what you learned as a result of the interviews and through other methods. If your topic is incentives at Nike, this section would discuss:
  • What types of financial incentives does Nike have that link employee, team, or organizational performance to rewards?
  • How do these rewards work? What are their strengths and limitations in motivating workers? What are the problems in their implementation?

Be sure to structure your findings in a meaningful way, using headings and subheadings. Please do not summarize your findings by interviewee. Remember that the project is not meant to read like a transcript of your interviews. Your goal is to provide a description of the system in place, along with its upsides and downsides, rather than summarizing what three interviewees said during the interviews.

What matters in this section is to provide a complete coverage of what the company is doing, whether it is working, its strengths, and weaknesses. Everything you discuss in this section should relate to the company you are analyzing. Also, remember that perceptions define reality. Just because you think Nike does a good job with incentive management is not enough. What do the employees think? 

Recommendations: Provide your recommendations based on your findings. What are they doing right and should keep doing? What are the problems you have observed or areas for improvement? Your recommendations should:

• Be logical and reflect an understanding of the literature.
• Be feasible given the company.
• Be based on problems in the company you have actually observed, and identified in the findings section.
• Be related to your chosen topic. In other words, if your topic is reward systems, your recommendations should target the reward system. Do not suggest changes in the job design in a paper dealing with reward systems.

Reference List: Provide a list of all the sources you used using APA or MLA format – the format must be consistent for the paper. 10 sources are required 5 must come from management journals listed in the grading rubric. 

Grading Criteria for the Project

See the separate Grading Rubric Document. When I grade your paper, I will have the rubric and your paper pulled up and I will grade each section according to the bullets in that section. You will also be asked to fill our peer evaluations at the end of the term. Individual grades will be adjusted based on peer evaluations according to the point deductions in the peer evaluation form.