Case Study

Case study: Salary Inequities at Acme Manufacturing Q1. What would you do if you were Black? Would have held meeting with 3 front line supervisors and convinced them for restructuring of salaries. Secondly addressing the team of senior management (3supervisor, 1hr director, any one male senior counterpart from remaining male strength) about this salary alignment process too. One of the main challenges in management is in avoiding pat answers to everyday questions. There is nothing so dull, for you and your team, as you pulling out the same answer to every situation. It is also wrong. Each situation, and each person, is unique and no text-book answer will be able to embrace that uniqueness - except one: you are the manager, you have to judge each situation with a fresh eye, and you have to create the response. Your common sense and experience is your best guide in analyzing the problem and in evolving your response. Taken everyone's thought and suggestions too as this step would bring in streamlining of salary, sex equality and more team spirit. Q2. How do you think the company got into a situation like this in the first place? However, there were no similar supervisory jobs in which there were both male and female job incumbents. When asked, the Hr director said she thought the female supervisors may have been paid at a lower rate mainly because they were women, and perhaps George, the former president, did not think that women needed as much money because they had working husbands. However, she added she personally thought that they were paid less because they supervised less-skilled employees than did the male supervisors. Black was not sure that this was true. The company from which Black had moved had a good job evaluation system. Although he was thoroughly familiar with and capable in this compensation tool, Black did not have time to make a job evaluation study at Acme. Therefore, he decided to hire a compensation consultant from a nearby university to help...