MGMT 611

Human Capital
Paper

McMillen Jacobs Associates

Why was I so unhappy?

Felt unmotivated and undervalued
After the Hackman/Oldham model, realized job design was all
wrong
Wanted to take a deeper look at what affected motivation (not
as passionate)
Skill variety
Task identity
Task significance
Feedback
Autonomy

Motivation/Compensation
Love language, mine is gifts suggested by other manager I was close with

Hoping for A but rewarding B

Collaboration and knowledge transfer are what they preach but
everyone is on their own
Evaluated based on individual performance and only visible work is
rewarded
Say they want well-rounded engineers to groom into managers, but
value technical knowledge by far

Equity Theory
Why should I bother working hard when Im not being rewarded for it?

Performance Management
Developing subordinates
Expected much more from me didnt they teach this at MIT?!
Told me I was underqualified, then suggested many things, like taking masters
courses when I already had a masters degree, but gave no support for it
When work was light, senior management took work from me and other junior
level engineers in order to remain billable, looked bad on us

Providing immediate and constructive feedback

Black hole. Once the work was submitted, there was no way of knowing how you
did
Performance evaluations once a year came from supervisor who had not
necessarily worked with me and had not gotten feedback from other project
managers

Organizational Failure Structure

Organization at the very top was a matrix configuration, but each
principal and middle manager thereafter functioned like an executive
overseeing its own functional configurations.
As an employee-owned organization, when the merger was rumored,
there was internal chaosnobody believed it was a good idea, but
didnt want to be the one to stand against the rest. One of the louder
senior managers got promoted to principal in order to get him to keep
quiet, buy-in and vote for the merger
From then on, things changed rapidly and reshuffling began. MJA
wanted to be a one-stop-shop, so they acquired a construction services
company and began to downsize.

High Performance Work System

Motivation
Culture starts with the leadership employees felt company merged for
other interest
Profit sharing common ownership

Skills
Skills not used constructively
Delegation without ability to make good decisions is useless

Empowerment
Never felt ownership of any task no transparency on any level
No responsibility or accountability