Employer-Employee Interview Situation

Place: The dealer's office.

People: The dealer and the service manager.

Occasion: The service manager, who has been with the dealership five years, has apparently been

neglecting his job recently. Unapplied mechanics time has been rising, the shop is being left much dirtier than usual. In general, it appears that the service manager is not minding his business as he should. He has been a good service manager in the past, and the dealer doesn't know what has happened to change the situation. The purpose of the interview is to enable the dealer to find the cause of the problem and determine what can be done to alleviate it.

Group Hole-Play Exercises

The Sinking Ship

You are one of seven people who are the only survivors of a passenger ship that was hit in the South Pacific by an old World War II mine. You are now trapped in the bottom of the ship's hold, with only a small air lock to let you return to the surface. It takes approximately three minutes to operate the air lock to allow one person to escape.

The hold is steadily filling with water, and judging by the list of the ship, you have at the most fifteen minutes before the ship sinks quickly to the bottom of the 37,000-foot-deep Mariana trench.

Your problem is one of .survival. You are to determine as quickly as possible the most equitable way of deciding who will be saved in the fifteen minutes' time. Remember that it takes three minutes to save each person, so the maximum number that can be saved is five.

As each person is "saved," he or she will separate from the group and sit in a chair.' Both the amount of time taken by each person in the air lock and the remaining time left for the victims will be watched closely.

To impress the disaster victims with the seriousness of their situation, it is necessary to emphasize that those who are left in the hold will suffer a most hideous death—death by drowning.

Ability Grouping Meeting

The participating group members (group A) are to assume they represent the English teachers in a senior high school. The principal of the school has asked them to meet by themselves to formulate their recommendations pertaining to ability grouping in their classes for next year. ("Ability grouping" for this situation means the use of standardized test results as a basis of placement of students in class sections.) Two years ago the students were placed in classes on the following basis: Above Average Ability, Average Ability, and Below Average Ability. The following year students were not placed in classes on the basis of ability but were randomly placed into class sections. The principal is aware of some dissatisfaction with the grouping of students in English classes; thus, he or she is asking for the recommendation of the teachers involved.

Procedure. The participation group (group A) will meet in the center of the room for q period of twenty minutes to discuss the situation presented above. They realize that they must reach a decision before they meet with the principal. The rest of the members (group B) will observe group A's activity during their meeting. Following this twenty-minute period, group B will meet in the center of the room to discuss what they observed from group A's activity. (They will meet for approximately twenty minutes.) Group A will observe group B's evaluation. At the end of this period group A and group B will combine for a general reaction and/or summary of the two group meetings.

Case Problems

A clinical psychologist at a university feels that interviews with a client should be recorded on tape and that the benefits to be derived from such recordings would be impaired if the client knew in advance that the recording was to be made. The psychologist sometimes uses these recordings in the classroom to illustrate lectures, always without the knowledge of the client, though the client's name is not revealed to the class.

Question: Should the psychologist use these tape recordings as class demonstrations with­out the permission of the client?

Jan Dorn is an attractive twenty-year-old college student majoring in an. She is a student in Dr. Thompson's small-group communication class. Jan and her husband, Jim, rent a home on the same block where Dr. Thompson lives. Jim and Dr. Thompson have met and become friends as well as neighbors. Jim is currently serving six months' duty in the army. With comfortable financial support from her parents, Jan is able to continue her education. The first day of class Jan appears without her wedding ring, and in her self-introduction she does not reveal the fact that she is married. As the term progresses, Dr. Thompson learns that Jan has had a number of male members of the class spend the night at her house. On Easter Sunday Jan and Jim (home on leave) unexpectedly visit Dr. Thompson and his wife at their home.

Question: How should Dr. Thompson react in this situation?

Two years ago Sandy (now twenty) became engaged to Thad against the wishes of her parents and the rest of her family. None of them liked him, especially Sandy's mother. However, since the engagement was what Sandy wanted they all went along with it. Her parents never said she couldn't get married, and they were willing to pay for the wedding. After two years, Thad called Sandy and broke the engagement. Her whole family was angry and thought that Sandy had seen the light as well. She acted as if she had; in fact, she went out with some other boys and seemed to have a good time. Unknown to her family, though, she still loved Thad and, despite what he had done, still wanted to marry him. A few months later Thad met Sandy where she worked. She hadn't seen him for four weeks. Unexpectedly, they eloped. Her family had no idea he had come into town and didn't know what had happened until after the fact.

Question: How can this couple improve their relationship with her family?

The problem lies with my communication. I don't say much in class or give much feedback. Whenever I am pan of a group, whether in a class or in the fraternity, I don't feel a strong attraction toward the group. I am always putting myself in the background to observe. I feel firmly convinced that any communication on my part will not help the situation and that by participating in the group I will lose some of my concentration on the conversation. I very rarely feel any rewards from being in a group. I can associate with a group and understand their beliefs and feelings, but I can't really become a part of it. If forced to participate or be a part of the group, I generally do a poor job and don't get much out of it. I don't like conforming with rules or goals that other people have set. There are many things that I don't wish to share with others.

Question: How might this person overcome this difficulty?

My difficulty in communication isn't unusual in today's society. It is the communication gap between the young and old generations. That difficulty of communication happened between me and my parents, mainly my father.

Compared with other families we have more difficulties than usual because of his Japanese and my Latin traditions.

When I was twelve years old I left my farm home in Brazil and went to attend high school; until then I had just a Japanese education due to the influences of my family and the Japanese colony I lived in. So, at twelve I started a completely new life far from home. I don't know if it is the peculiarity of this age, but I had no trouble in accepting changes — after one year I was completely absorbed by the Latin customs and education (that's why I don't act like a Japanese but like a Brazilian). Since then there has been a conflict between my father and me which is both a generation gap and a culture gap.

Question: How might this person and the father improve their relationship?

A waitress is serving water to a customer in a crowded airport coffee shop at 7:30 a.m. The cashier, a woman about fifty years old, calls over to the waitress (she looks about eighteen years old) and says: "Don't let one person take a table for four. Use a table for two. You're taking up four spaces for one person. Don't ever do it again!" The waitress says nothing but goes away from the scene.

The customer, a man in a three-piece suit, responds to the cashier (who is seated off to his right and behind him), "When you get a nonsmoking section, I'll go to a different spot." The cashier responds, "You'll have a long wait, because we're not getting any nonsmoking section." The man continues to talk out loud to no one in particular—so that the cashier and others can hear. "I can't stand sitting with smoke blowing in my face." Later, he pays his bill without looking at the cashier or saying anything to her. She hands him his change without saying anything to him.

Question: How might this situation have been handled differently?

Organizational Communication Case Problems

You are the manager of a manufacturing plant that employs about five thousand people. Due to increasing material costs and absenteeism, as well as decreasing efficiency, one of your products has become about 8 percent more expensive than a local competitor's product. Your major purchaser has threatened to buy from your competitor unless you can bring your price back in line with the competition. If you lose this account, five hundred people will have to be laid off. You must find a way to cut costs and save those five hundred jobs. What do you do? How should you go about communicating this problem, and to whom?

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 1072