Social Security Administration

Office of Disability Adjudication and Review

Project Proposal


MGMT591: Leadership and Organizational Behavior
Professor: Thomas Donini
By; Gadiel Melendez












My paper is going to be about how to improve employees performances in the workplace
Overview of the Organization
The proposed organization topic for my final paper is the Social Security Administration
(SSA) agency of the U.S. Federal Government. This agency is responsible for administering
social security cards, a social insurance programs that consists of benefits such as retirement,
survivors, and disability benefits, which American people can qualify for through their tax
contribution to the Social Security.
I currently work for this agency in the Office of Disability Adjudication and Review
(ODAR), as a Senior Case Technician. I am responsible for providing technical and legal support
to the Administrative Law-Judges (ALJ) and other professional and technical positions that are
responsible for processing and making decisions on cases with regards to claimants entitlement
of benefits. I am responsible for developing and processing cases for review from the time they
are filed in the office until they are completed. In addition, I am responsible for independently
conducting various types of case development actions. My responsibilities also include the
processing of complex cases where I analyze and interpret the issues with regards to the
guidelines, procedures, policies, precedents, rulings, regulations, and the provisions of the law.
These are performed with the goal of examining medical and legal documentary evidence and
other supporting documents for the determination of how a case is to be process. The results of
the work I do and the ALJs decision is determined of on whether Social Security claimants may
be eligible and entitled to receive disability benefits under the Social Security Law.
A growing problem within the agency is the employees job performance and
productivity levels, which I believe negatively, affect not only the agency and the employees, but
mainly the claimants. In my opinion, about 35% of the employees are performing at a minimum
or even less than the minimum amount of work required. Employees often spend too much time
chit-chatting among each other and also take longer breaks than allotted. In addition, they spend
too much time surfing the Internet and shopping in nearby mall.
The claimants are the ones who suffer the most from this poor performance. Since our
office is responsible for reviewing the cases of claimants who have been initially denied their
claims and have decided to appeal, it is the job of the ODARs employees to prepare these
claimants cases so that the judges can make a decisions and for the attorneys to review their
claimants cases online.
The ODAR employees are required to complete and prepare at least 30 cases per month,
in addition to other responsibilities. Unfortunately, many of these cases are incorrectly prepared,
which causes a problem for the Senior Case Technician assigned to the judge, as he or she is
responsible for correcting those cases and for obtaining medical evidence, school records, and/or
in some instances, records from correctional institutions for non-represented claimants.
In addition, the employees who are responsible for preparing those cases do not review
their work as they are often busy doing things unrelated to work. They also often neglect to
review and exhibit additional documents with regards to a case, which also prevents attorneys
from accessing documents online.
The employees inefficient use of their time and their lack of diligence with their work
cause the cases to frequently be incorrectly prepared, which causes claimants to wait longer for
the judges final decision. Missing an outstanding evidence/records and other information for
particular cases, needs to be obtained by the Senior Case Technician who may not be aware of
such facts until approximately a month prior to the hearing which can result in delays.
The same problem occurs with some attorneys. If an attorney is unaware of the fact that
a case is ready for review, he or she will usually not request evidence until he or she receives
notice of the hearing, which is about 20 days prior to the hearing. However, by this time,
negligent attorneys would be unable to submit all of the necessary evidence because it takes 30
to 60 days for the medical facilities, schools, or correctional institutions to provide the requested
evidence. Some attorneys supply the evidence themselves prior to the hearing but some are just
as irresponsible as some of the ODAR employees. In addition, an attorneys compensation is
paid upon a granted favorable decision, as such; certain attorneys refuse to pay for claimants
records where their services may not be compensated due to possible unfavorable decision. In
these cases, most of the time, the same attorneys claim not to be able to retrieve evidence
themselves in spite of their efforts, therefore they request ODAR to obtain and pay for the
records, unless claimant can pay for it themselves.
Regardless of management asking the ODAR employees to keep track of such instances
in order to enable an investigation of the said anomalies, some of ODAR employees fail to do so
as they often slack around. In addition, certain employees are allowed to slack around because
of their connections. Also the influences of some employees get promoted to higher positions
even when they perform poorly and inefficiently. With that said, employee morale decreases,
which also leads to a lower productivity and unpleasant atmosphere among the employees and
the management.




Preliminary Problem Statement
The agency has a collaborative and friendly culture where employees can easily approach
their managers and leaders at any time. SSA also provides its employees with great benefits
such as, multiple health insurance programs, flexible time, sick, annual, and family leaves
immediately available upon unscheduled time off, subsidized public transportation, student loans
forgiveness program, continuous training courses, job security, and many other benefits. In spite
of all the benefits offered these do not seem to have any effect on the level and quality of the
employees performance nor do they motivate the employees to perform in a higher standard.
These benefits and privileges are being often abused. However, management does not seem to
be doing anything to correct such behaviors and to implement some form of corrective actions to
make sure that everybody is performing their tasks as expected, mainly due to the strong
employee union.
The lack of the authority over the employees performances not only is leading to delays
in the processing of claimants benefits, but this also leads to financial losses on the part of the
SSA, which in turn are essentially the tax payers money. In addition, the unfair treatment by the
management and equal opportunity to all the employees leads to disgruntlement of staff.
To address these problems, this paper will investigate ways in which organizational
behavior can be improved and sustained through the proper implementation of a rewards system.
In the same regard, this paper will discuss how learning from TCO A can be applied to the
problem posed in this paper. In particular, TCO A focuses on the differences that people make
in an organizations performance, as well as an assessment of how organizational behavior
concepts and theories can be used in achieving career success and improving an organization's
effectiveness.
Through the recommendations made in this paper, I hope to see employees
performances at the ODARs office will be improved through the proper implementation of a
rewards system, which in turn will lead to better services provided to claimants, cost savings for
the SSA, and increased employee morale.