I began my 28-year career with AT&T after earning my MBA. My first assignment was to supervise a group of technicians running a test facility. One of the objectives was to clear trouble tickets as soon as possible. Shortly after I started as the "boss" over the section, one of my technicians handed me a trouble ticket that had been open for over a couple of days. He asked, "What do you want me to do with this?" I was puzzled and answered, "Just enter it into the system." I shortly found out that the previous supervisor kept tickets with long duration outages in a separate drawer in the desk without entering them into the system, which enhanced the performance results for the section.

Okay class, what would you do?

Let's use the 3-step approach to problem solving.

Step 1. Define the problem

Why is this a problem? The failure to enter long duration trouble tickets would result in skewed performance results. Also, failure to report long duration outages would "hide" problems that should be fixed in order to increase customer service. In addition, the supervisor's performance measurement would be falsely inflated. Of most concern, the practice is clearly unethical.

Step 2: Identify potential causes using OB concepts and theories

As Kinicki and Fugate write, "Monitoring performance means measuring, tracking,, or otherwise verifying progress and ultimate outcomes" (2018, p. 215). In this case, because of unethical behavior by the supervisor, the measuring and tracking of results would result in inaccurate performance ratings and the hiding of potential systemic problems. Kinicki and Fugate list the causes of unethical behavior at work. One cause is termed Motivated Blindness. In this case it would have been easy to "...overlook the unethical behavior of another when it's in our interest to remain ignorant" (2019, p. 17).

Step 3: Make recommendations and take action

In this case, I simply told the technicians that we would report the long outages as required by the performance measurement system. We would also analyze the root causes of long outages and work to resolve the underlying problems.