Issues Resulting to Company’s Performance

What Would You Do?

1. Employers typically focus on two areas in reviewing job candidates—experience and knowledge. As a member of your organization’s human resources group, you have been thinking about how the recruiting process could be modified to include character as a third area of review. Candidates would be screened based on their honesty, integrity, and courage to do what is right. You have a meeting with your immediate manager coming up and wonder if you should broach this subject with her. If so, you need to be prepared to explain why you think this is important and to offer examples of how such a screening program could be accomplished.
2. You are currently being considered for a major promotion within your company to vice president of marketing. In your current position as manager of advertising, you supervise five managers and two hourly workers. As part of the annual salary review process, you have been given the flexibility to grant your employees an average 3 percent annual salary increase; however, you are strongly considering a lower amount. This would ensure that your department’s expenses stay under budget and would send the message that you are able to control costs. What factors do you need to consider in making this decision? How would you proceed?
3. As part of your company’s annual performance review process, each employee must identify three coworkers to be interviewed by his manager to get a perspective on the employee’s overall work performance. Your friend has offered to give you a glowing performance review if you agree to do the same for him. Truth be told, your friend is not a very dependable worker, and his work is often below minimum standards. However, he is a good friend, and you would hate to upset him. What would you do?
4. You are a recent graduate of a well-respected business school, but you are having trouble getting a job. You worked with a professional résumé service to develop a well-written résumé and placed it on several websites; you also sent it directly to contacts at a dozen companies. So far, you have not even had an invitation for an interview. You know that one of your shortcomings is that you have no real job experience to speak of. You are considering beefing up your résumé by exaggerating the extent of the class project you worked on for a few weeks at your brother-in-law’s small consulting firm. You could reword the résumé to make it sound as if you were actually employed there and that your responsibilities were greater than they actually were. What would you do?
5. You have just completed a grueling 10-day business trip calling on two dozen accounts in Latin America. There were even business meetings combined with social events late into the night and on the weekends. On the flight back home at the end of this marathon, you are tired and feeling as if you have not seen your family for a month. As you work on completing your expense report, you say to yourself, “The company does not pay me enough for the work that I do.” For more than a few moments, you think about padding your expense report to make up for all the extra hours and time away from your family. Would it be okay to add “extra expenses” to compensate for the hardship of the trip?