on most working days to start work on the next day$$s tasks and study. It was noticeable that many of her colleagues didn$$t work from home much, preferring instead to come into the CBD office and working standard office hours.

Amy was really proud of the quality of her work and in the fact that, over her first six months, she had never once called in sick or taken time off. She also received feedback from her line manager, informing her that she was the only one of her colleagues that had never had work returned in order to correct a mistake. It was her impression, from conversations with colleagues at the monthly after$-$work Friday drinks, that she was also turning over a greater volume of work than most of her peers.

At the end of her first six months with the firm, Amy met with her line manager to review her performance and received an $$excellent$$ rating across all aspects of her performance. The manager also awarded her a $5\%$ pay increment. A month later, Amy received the news that four of the graduates who started at the same time she did had been promoted, but that she had missed out. Talking to one of her colleagues in the tea room the next day, she was surprised to learn that all ten of the new recruits had received the same $$excellent$$ performance ratings from the manager, even those that everyone knew turned in sloppy work. Amy also learned that her $5\%$ pay rise was in fact one of the smallest awarded. Disappointed, Amy sought feedback from her line manager who told her to be patient, that she should keep on doing what she was doing, and there would be another promotion opportunity in a year$$s time. When pressed as to why others had been preferred to her for promotion, Amy$$s manager was fairly vague in his response, suggesting that it was possibly because they were seen as being marginally better on $$teamwork$$ and $$collegiality$.$ Even though the composition of the group promoted was balanced with respect to gender, Amy couldn$$t help but notice that they all had private school backgrounds and none came from a rural$/$regional background like her.

Following her $12-$month performance review, where she continued to receive uniformly $$excellent$$ ratings and another $4\%$ pay raise, Amy was re$-$assigned to a small team of $4$ consultants working on a $6-$month evaluation project for another public sector agency. She liked her new team members, who came from a diverse range of backgrounds. She also felt that this project was a better fit for her and closer to the kind of work she had expected to be doing. The project turned out to be quite complex and required team members to work closely with each other in order to meet the client$$s expectations. Somewhat reluctantly, Amy began commuting $3$ days a week into the CBD office. As before, each team member was assigned a separate part of the overall project to work on$,$ and set challenging individual performance goals by their line manager. These were reviewed on a weekly basis in a meeting between each team member and the manager. Amy found that achieving these set targets was extremely difficult and left little time for other things, including achieving some of the learning and development career goals she had set herself. She reluctantly suspended her enrolment in her postgraduate studies.

As time went by$,$ it became clear that the project as a whole was not going as well as expected. A month before the final report was due to the client, it became apparent that there were gaps in the overall work being performed by the team. Some parts of the project were complete, while others lagged far behind. While Amy was fairly sure that her own part of the project was on schedule, it seemed like the overall team$$s work wasn$$t$.$ An additional, more senior consultant, was brought in to take responsibility for better integrating the work of the team members and ensuring that the project as a whole got completed to a standard that would satisfy the client. Amy felt very discouraged. In the months that followed, she decided that things needed to change. Unfortunately for her, a major downturn in the labour market made it appear unlikely that she would find another job that paid as well as her existing one in the short$-$term. She was also reluctant to move out of Perth, having only just bought an apartment there.

$*$ What are the likely consequences of Amy$$s job dissatisfaction?

$*$ If you were Amy$$s line manager, what might you do to try and improve the situation for her?