Tutorial 8 – Solutions
Group Activity
1. You’re the supervisor of a group of employees whose task is to
assemble disk drives that go into computers. You find that quality is
not what it should be and that many of your group’s devices have to
be brought back and reworked; your boss says that “You’d better
start doing a better job of training your workers.” A) What are some
of the “staffing factors” that could be contributing to this problem?
B) Explain how you would go about assessing whether it is in fact a
training problem. Have students brainstorm the potential factors other
than training that could be the root cause of this problem. Make the point
that often people will immediately point to training as the issue, when in
fact there are other factors at play that are impacting performance. (LO
8.4; AACSB: Analytic Skills; Learning Outcome: Compare and contrast
different approaches to training and development)
2. Choose a task with which you are familiar –cleaning your apartment,
making a bowl of noodles, or studying for a test – and develop a job
instruction training sheet for it. There is an example of a job instruction
training sheet for operating a large motorized paper cutter in the text.
Students should be able to put the task they select into the format given.
(LO 8.6; AACSB: Reflective Thinking Skills; Learning Outcome: Compare
