(2) How should Foley and Sayer MicroWorld deal with the situation now (specific recommendations and action steps)? Some issues you might want to consider in your analysis include: (a) What can Foley learn from this experience about managing in this organization?
Since Walters, who had been the IBM product manager at Sayer MicroWorld, was promoted to be a department director, Foley, a vice president of product control, needed to recruit a new person to fit in this vacant job. However, this job placed relatively high demands on workers due to the toughness of job’s nature. To be an IBM product manager, the candidates did not have only outstanding qualifications, but also ability to work longer hour than regular work hour. Finally, Foley decided to hire Mcneil, a 37-year-old single mother who lived one-and-quarter-hour far from company, because of her professional background and evident spirit of her toughness. This report addresses the current problems of McNeil’s difficulties in managing work and family responsibilities. We suggest that these problems are fundamentally due to overworking and failure to highly perform both work and family roles. We arrived at these conclusions by applying the mismatched worker theory to McNeil’s situation. We have found that McNeil was facing temporal mismatch and work-family mismatch since she had worked more hours than she preferred. This work-schedule mismatch, moreover, led to conflict with family roles as the performing time of McNeil’s work made it difficult for her to take good care of her family’s obligations. We are recommending that the company should has specific job’s descriptions, candidates’ requirements and limitations for this job position in order to acquire the ones who fit perfectly to this position. Foley concerned only about McNeil’s skills, which were match to his requirements, however, he did not consider