Hi, this is the tutorial video for the situational management assignment, the first assignment in Management 101, Principles of Management. I'm going to start by bringing up the explanation sheet, the Using the Situational Management Model file. You'll find that on Blackboard under Course Content.
That should open up in its own window and you'll see this. The first thing to understand about the situational management model is that we have to first of all identify the employee capability level. The employee capability level consists of two aspects, ability and motivation. As you'll find described to you in the text on page 36, ability has to do with whether or not employees have the knowledge, experience, education, skills, and training to do a particular task without direction.
Motivation, on the other hand, has to do with their confidence in their ability to do the task. Do they want to do it? Are they committed to performing the task and doing so well? Will they do the task without your encouragement and support?
When we assess the employee's ability and motivation, we should arrive at an ability level that is one of four levels. We have either low, moderate, high, or outstanding. As described in the text, a low capability level employee is somebody who cannot do the task without detailed direction and close supervision. Employees who are at a low capability level are either unwilling or unable to perform the task.
And almost always these are going to be employees who are what we might call problem employees. They're actively resisting doing the task. At the moderate level of capability, the employee has a moderate ability to do the task they still need some specific direction and support to get it done properly they might have quite a bit of motivation but they still need some direction from the manager very commonly this is where you will find brand new employees they want to do a good job they're motivated to do a good job they do not yet have though the ability to do so without some support in terms of task and direction from the manager Your high capability level employees know how to do the job.
They have high ability, but they might lack the motivation. This is common if you take an experienced employee and perhaps present them with a more challenging task than they've had before. You know they can do it. You're positive that they can do it.
There's no doubt there. But they may lack the confidence to do so without your encouragement and support. So you encourage them and support them and help convince them that they can do the task that you know they can do. With our outstanding capability level employees, they have all the ability that they need, they have all the motivation that they need, they can do the task without your direction, they can do the task without your support, and in fact spending much time telling them what to do or telling them how sure you are that they can do it is really sort of a waste of their time and yours.
These are the employees who are, as the label seems to suggest, outstanding. Based on the capability level, we're going to be able to choose one of four management styles. Before we get to that, though, we have to describe the management styles. Each management style consists of two types of interaction, which we're going to measure as being either high or low, and that's going to give us four possible styles. The first of the management behaviors that we're going to look at is the directive behavior.
Directive behaviors you'll find in the text, again, on page 36. The manager is focusing on directing and controlling. behavior and that's to ensure that the employee does the task properly and we're closely overseeing that performance to make sure that gets done. The supportive behavior on the other hand the manager is focusing on encouraging and motivating. We're not necessarily telling the employee what to do although we could be engaging in some directive behavior as well.
The manager explains what needs to be done, listens to employee questions, invites employee questions and helps the employee to increase their self-esteem and build up their confidence. So we can have high directive and high supportive, high directive, low supportive, low directive, high supportive, and of course low directive and low supportive behaviors. And that's going to give us our four management styles as you can see listed right here. The autocratic style is high directive and low supportive.
That indicates a management behavior that is More concerned with how to do the task rather than building relationships. You'll find that described in your text on page 37 if you want to look at it there. We use this only with low capability level employees. As you can see down here, you can see the mapping of each capability level to each management style. So again, with the autocratic style.
we tell the employee exactly what to do exactly how to do it exactly when to do it exactly where to do it and we oversee the performance closely remember we're only using this with low capability level employees the consultative style as you can see here is high directive and high supportive so that means while we're going to still give quite a bit of direction tell people how to do things we're also at the same time going to give them a lot of opportunity to ask questions. We're going to explain why the task is done this way. We're going to motivate them and encourage them and try and build some relationship with them as they perform this task. So it is simultaneously both focusing on the nature of the task and also the motivation that the employees might need. Roughly equal time spent doing both.
With the Participative Style you can see that it's low on the Directive Scale and high on the Supportive Scale. Now what this means is we're not going to spend much time at all telling employees how to do the task, simply because we're sure that they know how to do it. Instead, we're going to spend most of our time encouraging them, motivating them, letting them ask questions, explaining why the task is being done the way it's being done, explaining why they were chosen to do it.
And again, this style would be appropriate for a high capability level employee. That's quite frequently going to be an experienced employee who's being presented with a new and challenging task that they haven't done before but for which the manager is absolutely certain they're capable and prepared to be able to do it successfully finally we have the empowering style you can see here with the empowering style we have both low directive and low supportive behaviors we're going to spend little to no time telling employees how to do the job and little to no time working on improving their confidence their self-assurance or providing with a motivation to do it because they don't need it. These employees are extremely capable, they're extremely well motivated, and it's simply a matter of letting them know the job needs to be done and they will go off and do it.
So as you can see when the capability level is low we will always use autocratic, when the capability level is moderate we will always use consultative, when the capability level is high we will always use participative, and when the capability level is outstanding we will always use empowering. I'm going to switch over to the assignment worksheet here in a moment, but in general, here's how it's going to be completed. You will read a scenario, you will assess the employee capability level, and everything's going to follow in line after that.
If the capability level is moderate, then the management style will be consultative. As you can see here, moderate, consultative. If it's the consultative style, that's high directive, high supportive.
As you can see right here, consultative is high directive and high supportive. So you would have the capability level moderate, the management style consultative, the behavior to use would be describing it in terms of directive and supportive, and then the action taken is a description of what that actually looks like. For instance, for consultative it might be spend time getting to know them personally, but make sure they maintain performance levels. To actually access the assignment sheet, back on Blackboard, it's right here.
You can download it by clicking this link. It is a Word document. And you'll be able to open that up.
And I already have one open, so let me go ahead and switch over to it. So here we have the actual worksheet. You can see that there's a place for you to put your name. You can, of course, if this is a face-to-face class, you can print this out and fill this one out by hand. It isn't necessary to type this, but since it is a Word document, if you prefer, you can type your responses.
And what you're going to see is that there are five scenarios listed here. And you'll read the scenario and then respond as I showed you on the previous part of the video. The capability level, which is going to be either low, moderate, high, or outstanding. The management style, which is either going to be autocratic, consultative, participative, or empowerment.
The behavior to use, which is going to be the combination of high and low, directive and supportive behaviors indicated by that management style. And then the action to use, which is going to be your description of what that looks like. And I have two for us to look at as an example, rather than going over the ones you're actually going to turn in. So here are two sample questions. The first one, your rookie crew seems to be developing well.
Their need for direction and close supervision is diminishing. What do you do? The first question is, what is their capability level?
In this particular circumstance, and in fact this example is taken from the text, and you can see it described on page 37, it was the first of the self-assessment scenarios you were given in this particular situation these are probably moderate capability level employees they started off maybe being low capability level but they've now advanced to the moderate level so I'm gonna go ahead here and Click and hit tab and I'm going to type in that these are moderate capability level employees. For a moderate capability level employee, the appropriate management style is always consultative. That's the appropriate style for a moderate capability level employee.
Again, low capability level, autocratic. Moderate capability level, consultative. High capability level, participative.
Outstanding capability level. empowerment. So since these are moderate, I'm going to type participative, I'm sorry consultative. Now the proper behavior to use under consultative, we describe that as being both high directive and high supportive. So again I hit tab and I type high directive, high supportive.
and then we would describe the action to be taken. And this is going to be a little bit different for everybody, but what does that actually look like? In the case of a consultative approach, we might say something here very similar to what we had as one of our choices in the text. Something to the extent of spend time getting to know them personally.
but make sure that they maintain performance levels something to that extent okay for the second one you assign jill a task specifying exactly how you wanted it done jill deliberately ignored your directions and did it her way the job is not going to meet the customer standards and it This is not the first problem you've had with Jill. What do you decide to do? Well, the first thing, of course, is to decide what her capability level is. I don't think there's much room for disagreement on this.
Jill is a low capability level employee. She is intentionally doing things incorrectly and apparently does so on a regular basis. If we have a low capability level employee, the appropriate management style is autocratic. The behavior to use under the autocratic style, and I'm going to have to hit tab twice there, is high directive, low supportive. And as far as the action to take with Jill, and you can actually look at the multiple choices that you had for this scenario in the book.
This was the second one on page 34. The best example of autocratic behavior is... Tell Jill to do it again the right way and closely supervise the job. And that would be the appropriate action to take if you were using the autocratic style. Again, you're going to go in and do what I just did there with these five scenarios.
And in grading this, I will give you full credit for both the first best and the second best answer. So there is a 50-50 shot at getting the answer correct, as long as you're consistent in giving the correct management style for the correct capability level. So for instance, if you said low capability, it has to be autocratic. and then describe the behavior properly, which for autocratic would be high directive, low supportive, and then the action taken should be in sync with what you've chosen for those. But you do have some room to slightly differ from the so-called correct answers, and I'll give some partial credit for that.
You won't have a problem there. All right. Thank you very much.