Question 1
From the background information, it is clear that Taylor & Smith has an organization structure of Marketing Group Structure. Reasons are listed below.
The 70 offices scattered all over the world are quite decentralized and has a great deal of independence on how to run the office’s operations.
Manager of office prefer to keep office small and keep tight control over them
At the global level the firm is run by an executive board mad of up managing partners.
Question 2
Below is a list of description of the effectiveness of the company’s current reward and management systems in 5 items
i. Intrinsic, extrinsic and social rewards
Extrinsic: The Company’s bill system is based on billable hours and performance bonus. Billable hours is central way of evaluate performance of lawyers. After years of serving in the company, the support staff will have an opportunity to be promoted to associates. The associates can also have chance to become partners basing on the performance. This can also be concluded in the Survey question 2 where most employee think their salaries are above industry average. (4.5/5.0)
Intrinsic: the bonus of associates is based on the ranking and performance.
Social: the company has issues on the social reward. Employees have a poor working relationship with their supervisors, scoring only 2.5/5.0.it also seems that layers don’t trust their manager so much(2.7/5.0). All these point to a poor social reward between supervisor and employee. In answering the co-worker relationship, most people gave a high score of 4.3, which indicating an effective coworker social reward inside the office. But lawyers between offices don’t interact enough (2.5/5.0), indicating a low social reward between different offices. ii. Perceived effort-reward probability iii. Abilities and traits: In answering the question of training and development opportunities in the company, people gave a low score of 2.5, which implying that Taylor & Smith did inadequate in training and developing employees. iv. Role perceptions: Taylor & Smith has serious problem in this area. This can be concluded from the survey data. Lawyers seldom receive clear guidance and feedback on what is expected in the job (2.0/5.0). In their job, most of them don’t have a clear planned goal and objects for the job. However, lawyers find that their job is interesting and exciting (4.5/5.0), and those they have variety of interesting activities (4.0/4.5), pointing to a high self motivation.
v. Perceived equity of rewards
Many associates are not content about the current ranking system. From the comment quoted in the global survey, employees meet same performance goals are paid differently. This may harm the satisfaction of employees. What is more, the ranking system sometimes irrelevant to the job performance.
Question 1
a) Strategic congruence: The new goal is not congruent with the current evaluating system. Under the current evaluating system, offices focus on the regional business, hence the performance is largely depending on the billable hours of lawyers. With the new strategy, the offices are required “be better able to support global multinational clients”, which means the performance would largely depend on how depth of the cooperation between different offices. Accordingly, the new evaluating system should consider the factor of the interaction between offices. What is more, the associates are expected to bill 2000 hours per year and leave little work-life balance. According to the statement of new landscape, most people left the company not because of salary but because of the less commitment to family. This is evaluation of billing hours contradict to the goal of “reducing turnover”.
b) Validity: the current evaluating system have some defects in which some criteria are not relevant to job, this would make it impossible for employee to get a top rating. What is more, the criteria is too general and ambiguous to reflect the real
