Scenario based question Application 4

In 1975, Fred Ferret opened Wollongong Wire Works (WWW) a wire loom foundry in the heart of Wollongongs industrial area. Over the next 30 years he built his business up to be the number one provider of wire looms in Australia. Fred pinned his success on his no-nonsense authoritarian, task-based leadership style something he associates with his command training in Vietnam. In 2019, his list of clients included: Telstra, Ford Australia, Optus and Andrew Antennas, with annual sales of, respectively: $3.5 million, $2.8 million, $1.8 million, and $1 million. He employed 250 staff in manufacturing, 25 staff in warehousing, 16 staff in administration and 32 staff in sales.

Freds business is now suffering large setbacks due mainly to the COVID-19 Novel Coronavirus crisis, and in March of 2020 he lost two of his biggest clients. As a result, Fred has had to reduce his workforce by 40%. Currently, however, he is planning to expand into South East Asia, and potentially get the jump on his competitors as soon as the virus-related travel bans are lifted. Early engagement across his business networks show that in Japan, Taiwan and Malaysia alone he can project an additional $10 million in sales for the financial year 2022/23.

Fred is now facing a problem even larger than his original problem. He has too few skilled workers to meet the demands of these new contracts. He also needs additional sales and technical staff to work overseas. Further, his recently laid-off workers are bitter with their recent redundancies and refuse to be re-employed. Rumours have since spread through the Wollongong community that these workers had a poor work ethic and were not organisational focused, having low OCB (organisational citizenship behaviour), and Fred tried everything he could to retain them. Each also received generous payouts.

Gender	Male	75%
	Female	25%
Age	19	10%
	20	15%
	21	20%
	22	25%
	23	10%
	24+	20%
Study	Electrical	65%
	Management	25%
	Marketing	10%
Work experience	Bar work	25%
	Restaurants	15%
	Retail	20%
	Work-related	10%
	No work exp	27%

Table 1. Breakdown of student demographics

Fred occasionally teaches at Wollongong University, where he is well received by students and staff. This connection gave Fred an idea for a possible solution to his problem. He is negotiating with the university and TAFE to take the top 150 high achieving students from three classes: management, marketing, and electrical engineering. This will give him a new staff of 150 workers ready to start in four weeks. These students though, have had no previous work experience in this industry. Many have not even worked before. Most of the students are in their early twenties. They are all of Australian ethnicity and are mainly male. A breakdown of these students can be found in Table 1. Fred feels, however, that given their lack of experience, he will need to establish tight job descriptions and work orders.

Q1. Fred is going to take a single theory of motivation and apply this to his new workforce so that he can get them working as hard and as quickly as possible.

Study the case carefully:

1. What is the best theory of motivation that Fred should adopt to get the most out of his new workers? Select (CIRCLE) your answer from the options below, and
2. Prepare six bullet points to explain why (Justification)

1. Goal-Setting Theory
2. Three Needs Theory
3. Theory X & Theory Y
4. Equity Theory
5. Expectancy Theory