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Manual
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CHAPTER 6
CONTROLLING
TYPES OF CONTROLS
What Is Preventive Control?
When Are Concurrent Controls Used?
What Is Corrective Control?
BUILDING A TEAM
COMMUNICATING EFFECTIVELY
ADDITIONAL ACTIVITIES
CHAPTER 6
CONTROLLING
• Controlling
—The management function concerned with monitoring activities to ensure that they
are being accomplished as planned and correcting any significant deviations
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• What to measure
—Probably more critical than how you measure
—What you measure determines what your employees will emphasize
—Will be determined in the planning process
—Some criteria will be situation-specific; others will be job-specific
—What you measure must be adjusted to fit the goals of your department
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• Flowchart
See: Exhibit 6-4: Example of a flowchart.
—A visual presentation of the sequence of events for a particular process
• Scatter diagram
See: Exhibit 6-5: Example of a scatter diagram.
—Illustrates the relationship between two variables
• Control chart
See: Exhibit 6-6: Example of a control chart.
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TYPES OF CONTROL
Objective 6-3. Compare preventive, concurrent, and corrective control.
• Preventive control
—Anticipates and prevents undesirable outcomes
—Preventive maintenance programs
—Careful screening to hire the right people
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• Concurrent control
—Much of the supervisor’s day-to-day activities
—Takes place while an activity is in progress
—Directly overseeing the actions of employees
—Temperature, pressure, and similar gauges checked during the production processes
—Computer programs which signal when incorrect data are input
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• Corrective—post control
—Provides feedback after an activity is finished to prevent future deviations
—Final inspections
—Financial reports/audits
—Performance appraisals
—After-the-fact; by the time the supervisor gets the information, the damage has
already been done
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• Historically
—Quality referred to achieving some pre-established standard for an organization’s
products or services
• Today
—Much broader perspective
—A continuous-improvement program emphasizes actions to prevent mistakes
• Quality control
—Emphasizes identifying mistakes that may have already occurred
—Encompasses preventive, concurrent, and corrective controls
—Needed at multiple points in a process; inputs—operations—outputs
—Involves both products and services
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• Timeliness
—The best information is useless if it arrives too late
• Flexibility
—Ability to adjust to changes or take advantage of new opportunities
• Understandability
—Employees who don’t understand controls will ignore them
• Reasonable criteria
—Unreasonable, unethical, or illegal criteria will lead to lack of motivation or
unethical or illegal shortcuts
• Critical placement
—Control the factors that are critical to performance goals
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• Employee resistance
—Many people don’t like to be told what to do, or to feel that they’re being checked
up on
—They see controls as evidence that their supervisor doesn’t trust them
—Have employees participate in setting the control standards
—Treat controls as devices for helping employees improve, rather than for
punishment
—Encourage employee self-control
• Misdirection of effort
—Focus on following the rules
—If the control system evaluates only quantity, people will ignore quality
—If the control system measures activities rather than results, people will spend their
time trying to look good on the activity measures
—Make sure control standards are perceived by your employees as reasonable
—Select and evaluate criteria that are directly related to achievement of employee job
goals
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See: Something to Think About (and promote class discussion) Out With E-Mail
• Organizational theft
—Employees commit 85 percent of all organizational theft and fraud
—Loose financial controls, availability of information technology, financial
pressures, and individual rationalization have made employee theft an escalating
problem
• Sarbanes-Oxley Act
—Establishes procedures for companies to report their financial picture
—Establishes penalties for noncompliance
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ENHANCING UNDERSTANDING
6-1. Why may what we measure be more critical to the control process than how we
measure it?
Learning Objective: 6-1
AACSB tag: 7
As long as your method of measuring is fair and complete, it doesn’t matter how you
measure actual performance. What you measure indicates to the employees what you feel is
important.
6-3. Which type of control is preferable: preventive, concurrent, or corrective? Why? What
type do you think is most widely used in practice?
Learning Objective: 6-2, 6-3
AACSB tag: 8
“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Trite, but true. Preventive control is the
most desirable, but concurrent control is used much more. Correctional control is probably
the most widely used, but it is the costliest because it is after-the-fact; the damage has already
been done.
6-5. In terms of characteristics of an effective control system, where do you think most
control systems fail? Why?
Learning Objective: 6-2, 6-3
6-8. What can a supervisor do to minimize the problem of people trying to look good on
control criteria?
Learning Objective: 6-5, 6-6, 6-8
AACSB tag: 8
Controls are needed to measure effectiveness of performance. Critical to this concept is the
necessity to control the things that have to be controlled and to make the controls reasonable
and fair. Otherwise, employees will try to look good by circumventing what they consider to
be unnecessary, unreasonable, and unfair controls.
Overview
In the management literature, confidence is called self-efficacy. This refers to an
individual’s belief that he or she is capable of performing a task. The higher one’s self-
efficacy, the more confidence one has in his/her ability to succeed in a task. So, in
difficult situations, we find that people with low self-efficacy are likely to lessen their
effort or give up altogether, whereas those with high self-efficacy will try harder to
master the challenge. In addition, individuals high in self-efficacy seem to respond to
negative feedback with increased effort ant motivation, whereas those low in self-efficacy
are likely to lessen their effort when given negative feedback.
3. Social persuasion. Having respected, competent others persuade them that they
have what it takes.
Make sure students understand the difference between self-esteem and self-
efficacy. Self-esteem is one’s global image of self, and does not correlate to specific
performance improvement like self-efficacy does.
Exercises
1. As a class discussion, have students discuss times in their lives in which they were
very confident that they were going to succeed. This could be in the context of an
exam they knew that they were going to get an A on, an athletic event in which they
just knew that they were going to succeed, or a speech that they had to give in which
they knew they were going to deliver it perfectly. Students should contrast this to
times in which they did not perform so well, and have them compare why.
Learning objectives:
Compare the actual outcomes of low versus high self-efficacy.
Preparation/time allotments:
This should be about a 20-minute class discussion.
2. Using the sources of self-efficacy discussed above, have the students use this concept
to improve their chances of achieving their course goals. In other words, once they
have set challenging, specific goals, what steps can they take to improve efficacy, and
thus, their chances of succeeding.
Preparation/time allotments:
Students should have completed exercise #14 in this manual. Use this activity as
an action plan to add to it. Give them a week or so to develop a plan and have
them talk about it in small groups.
Internet Links
1. http://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Bandura/BanEncy.html
This is a rich website that contains detailed information on self-efficacy by Albert
Bandura, the noted psychologist credited with much of the work on self-efficacy.
Visit this site, and read about his ideas. Bring your insights back to class with you,
and incorporate those ideas into your goal-setting plan for this course.
Overview
This questionnaire is designed to calculate the Motivation Potential Score (MPS)
for the Job Characteristics Model. The MPS represents a summary score indicating how
motivating you find the jobs you’re describing.
Job motivating potential is probably more crucial today than it was in past
decades. Many people are quite satisfied with a stable job with no real desire to be
motivated beyond an average performance, and work for reasons of monetary reward, not
challenging or enriching work. The questionnaire measures the intrinsic or extrinsic
nature of the person’s motivation. The questionnaire helps one measure existing or past
work experience. If one is intrinsically motivated, one will probably tend to do jobs that
are measured by the descriptors of six to seven.
Teaching Notes
Gen X wants challenging jobs, but they also want to balance family and work.
They are not the boomers who live to work, rather they work to live. They want to be
challenged, but will not devote their total lives to either making money or the
corporation. They are more than willing to change jobs and to seek a more comfortable
workplace that accommodates their needs, wants, and demands. They are motivated, but
Exercises
1. Ask the class if they would rather make $100,000 a year and work 80 hours a week or
make $60,000 and work 40 hours a week. Add to this then that the $100,000-per-year
job scores much lower on the job design survey than the $60,000-per-year job.
Discuss the implications in terms of work, motivation, lifestyle, and the work ethic.
Learning objectives:
Apply job design techniques to actual jobs. This exercise also illustrates that there
is much more to motivation and work than just money.
Preparation/time allotments:
Have the students fill out a survey considering the most boring job that they have
ever had, and compare it to the most exciting job that they ever had. To relate this
to the exercise, ask them how much they would have needed to get paid to keep
the boring job, or how much pay they would have given up to retain the exciting
job.
2. Discuss and debate the changing nature of work and how motivation is affected. You
can divide the class into groups of three to four people and have them discuss these
issues. Then reform into a class and have each group present what they discussed.
Learning objectives:
Discuss and relate how macro-level economic issues affect specific jobs.
Preparation/time allotments:
This should be about a 20-minute exercise. You could also make it an outside
research project, with groups either turning in a paper, or doing a class
presentation.
Internet Links
1. http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?articleid=1556757&show=html
This website of the Journal of Management Development provides more details on
the topic of job design. Specifically, it details Hackman & Oldham’s Jobs
Characteristics Model, which is the basis for this assessment. Read the article, and
come to class prepared to discuss how jobs can be re-designed based upon this model.
2. http://www.coastwiseconsulting.com/article_downsizing.htm
Motivation is obviously affected by the times and the organizational culture; that is, is
there a fit? Downsizing has been going on for many years with no real end in sight.
Here is an article called “The Impact of Downsizing on Corporate Culture.” Please
read this article and be prepared to discuss its implications for motivation in the years
to come as well as your own motivation.
Overview
The instrument is designed to assess the degree to which a person desires
complex, challenging work. The issues that were mentioned in Assessment 18 relate to
this instrument.
Teaching Notes
Gen Y, the generation after Gen X, is said to be the most educated group of young
people ever. Some of the well-known Gen Y members are Napster creator and
multimillionaire Shawn Fanning, teen opera dynamo Charlotte Church, and Prince
William. They have been highly motivated throughout their childhood, and some are still
growing. This is the age group now in their teens. They will definitely want challenging
and enriching work. More than likely they will not want to start at the bottom and work
their way up. They like to work in teams, and this may be the best approach for enriching
their work. They have the ability to multitask with ease. They work best in a well-
supervised environment.
Exercises
1. Have a discussion with the students about their experiences with Gen Y. Have them
compare how they feel about working with Gen Y.
Learning objectives:
Compare motivation in a job-enrichment context across different generations.