Chelsea McGuire is the chairperson of a communication department at a university in the southeastern United States. She has been chair for more than five years and has built a successful department. But Chelsea has worried for some time that the department is too successful. Over the last few years, the number of communication majors in the university has steadily increased. When Chelsea took over as chair, there were 500 communication majors. There are now more than 800 such majors, with no indication that this trend will change. Unfortunately, university support for the department has not increased at the same pace, and with only fifteen department professors, Chelsea knows that some kind of action will soon need to be taken. A month ago, she appointed two separate groups to study the problem and formulate enrollment management plans. First, she formed an ad hoc enrollment management committee to investigate the problem. Second, she asked the standing undergraduate curriculum committee to consider avenues for handling the preponderance of communication majors. Chelsea now has a memo from each of these committees on her desk and has scheduled a meeting of the full faculty to discuss options and come to a decision about enrollment management. Let’s first take a look at the memos from the two committees: 

The Ad Hoc Committee on Enrollment Management has met on three occasions in the last month and conducted extensive research into enrollment management systems around the campus. Our goal was to determine the optimal system for stemming the flow of majors into the communication department. In order to reach our goal, we conducted a systematic survey of all other campus departments to determine if they too had experienced problems with overenrollment in the past ten years. If they had experienced this problem, we inquired about plans that had been instituted to deal with the problem and established how well these plans were working. We also carefully compared the characteristics of other campus departments with relevant attributes of the communication department in considering options for dealing with our own enrollment management problems. 

CASE ANALYSIS QUESTIONS 

1. How would you characterize the decision-making styles of the two committees that considered the enrollment management problem? Would you characterize either of these processes as more effective or appropriate to the decision under consideration? 

2. What advice would you give to Chelsea McGuire for the upcoming faculty meeting? Should she retain her typically participative decisionmaking style? What are the advantages and disadvantages of this kind of style in this type of decision-making situation? 

3. Are there specific decision making strategies that would be helpful in making an effective decision regarding enrollment management? What communication behaviors would you watch for in the upcoming meeting to assess whether an effective decision-making process is being used? 

4. How might a “symbolic convergence” perspective on social and emotional communication in the group influence your assessment of the situation? How might a “bona fide group” perspective on the way the group is embedded in organizational structures (e.g., the department, the university, professional institutions) influence your assessment of the situation?

Transcribed Image Text:

Dr. Chelsea McGuire Dr. Walter Staniszewski Chair, Ad Hoc Enrollment Management Committee Date: March 23, 2011 Subject: Enrollment Management Plan To: From: