Motivation & Salary

Motivation & Salary

It Isn’t Fair
Developed by Barry R. Armandi, SUNY-Old Westbury

Mary Jones was in her senior year at Central University and interviewing for jobs. Mary
was in the top 1 percent of her class, active in numerous extracurricular activities, and was
highly respected by her professors. After the interviews, Mary was offered a number of
positions with every company with which she interviewed. After much thought, she decided
to take the offer from Universal Products, a multinational company. She felt that the salary
was superb ($40,000), there were excellent benefits, and good
potential for promotion. Mary started work a few weeks after graduation and learned her job
assignments and responsibilities thoroughly and quickly. Mary was asked on many occasions
to work late because report deadlines were moved forward often. Without hesitation she said
“Of course!” even though as an exempt employee she would receive no overtime. Frequently,
she would take work home with her and use her personal computer to do further analyses.
At other times, she would come into the office on weekends to monitor the progress of her
projects or just to catch up on the ever-growing mountain of correspondence. On one
occasion her manager asked her to take on a difficult assignment. It seemed that the
company’s Costa Rican manufacturing facility was having production problems. The quality
of one of the products was highly questionable, and the reports on the matter were
confusing. Mary was asked to be part of a team to investigate the quality and reporting
problems. The team stayed in poor accommodations for the entire three weeks they were
there. This was because of the plant’s location near its resources, which happened to be in
the heart of the jungle. Within the three-week period the team had located the source of the
quality problem, corrected it, and altered the reporting documents and processes. The head
of the team, a quality engineer, wrote a note to Mary’s manager...

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