The Impact of COVID-19 in Organisations

The purpose of this qualitative assignment:
The purpose of this case study is to integrate and implement insights from the course towards understanding and addressing employee and managerial challenges in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The coronavirus and the subsequent lockdowns imposed on the economy have presented organisations with many challenges, both from the management’s perspective and in terms of the employee experience. In this work, you will be asked to conduct two interviews (1 with an employee, and 1 with a junior manager) to obtain information on the challenges they have been facing due to the pandemic. You should then use this information together with the theories, models and concepts you learned in the seminar to understand and discuss the challenges of the current era for employees and managers.

Your findings and relevant course learnings should be presented in the form of a written case study. Please follow the guidelines outlined below.

Guidelines:

2. The submission should be made in word-file and should not be longer than 5 pages
   ( Times New Roman, size 12, double-spaced, not including references and appendices)
3. Please submit your case study on Moodle, under the “Case Study Submission” link
4. A good case study is one that combines the relevant seminar materials/readings and theoretical concepts and models learned in the course, with the information obtained from the interviews.
5. The interviewees can come from any organisation and industry of your choice. One of your interviewees should be an employee of an organisation and the other should be in a managerial position (please note: first-time or junior managers may be easier to gain access to than more senior managers). Convenience sampling (finding participants who are already within your network or who come from an organisation where you already know someone) is perfectly acceptable for this case study. Since the interviews need not be conducted face to face, you may also conduct interviews with individuals working abroad.
6. In order to help you ask meaningful questions and draw relevant conclusions, we suggest that you first reflect on the topics covered in the course in Weeks 1-5 and formulate a general research question you would like to address in relation to COVID-19 in organisations – e.g. specific challenges that organisations were facing during lockdown or when working in hybrid manner, the differences and similarities between the way managers and employees experienced the pandemic, challenges to organisational fairness when (returning to) working in hybrid manner, work-family conflict, etc.