Assignment 2: Joe Salatino, President of Great Northern American
Case Study

2/5/2013
BUS520-Leadership and Organizational
Dr. Leonardo R. Serrano
TiAnquaneta Q Wilson

It seems like Great Northern American has done a decent job of using learning concepts to improve salesperson performance they have been going at it for 35 years, after all, and are still competitive in the marketplace. It would appear that Joe Salatino has proven techniques that help incentivize people to generate sales for the company. The case mentioned that the company was faced with stiff competition from internet sellers. With the developments in the past decade of telecommuting arrangements, there may be threats from direct competitors that employ cheaper methods of direct selling.
As President of the organization he is responsible to give direction to his employees. He needs to help them to understand the Company's mission and work towards it. Joe could do an analysis of the organizational culture of his own company with them. Anonymously or directly he could ask their employees what is the perception they have about the Company. After that ask what in their opinion may have generated this perception. Mr. Salatino can show how these perceptions ultimately influence the organization both positively and negatively. He could address the differences in the each individual personality, as people have different types of management, motivational issues, training, etc .So he could do an analysis of how perceptions and attributions that employees have on the Company align with it goals. He can show how these perceptions contribute or not to the company achieve its objectives. Then on he could make a connection with the perception that customers have about the company and how the Company can improve this relationship by developing skills that improve the performance of their employees in meet more effectively the needs of its customers. His employees should understand that can be heard and that their just demands are met. This type of relationship will bring loyalty and create a model more effective to work with their clients.
Self-efficacy is basically an individual’s confidence in their ability to perform a specific task in a specific situation. Salatino is essentially looking for salespeople with a high level of self-efficacy. These would be independent people with an internal locus of control; they would probably not be stressed by a loud, fast-paced environment and a reward system that only rewards them when they perform well. And they would push themselves to do better each month. Self efficacy influences what activities and goals individuals choose for themselves and how much persistence and effort they exert. Potential new hires that had already been effective previously as a salesperson would probably have a higher level of self-efficacy, so it would make sense for Salatino to hire salespeople with as much experience as possible.“Performance accomplishments are the most influential sources of efficacy information because they are based on personal mastery experience. Vicarious experience obtained through observation of successful or unsuccessful performance of others is next most potent and, indeed, may account for a major part of learning throughout life”. (Rosenstock, PhD, Strecher, PhD, & Becker, PhD, 1988). I suggest that Mr. Salatino bring ideas of success from the market and discuss them with its employees and discuss ways to adapt them to the characteristics and mission of the company. At these meetings, perhaps weekly, can be addressed competencies that must be assimilated by the sales team to align themselves with the business goals, becoming agents of implementation and change. Employees must understand that they are heard and that they can speak openly. When this happens, Mr. Palatine may understand better the views and feelings of his employees and directs them to the points that can substantially improve the company culture. Being a role model, he will create confidence and will show the way that his employees need to follow to achieve the desired results.
Additionally, I would recommend they become more educated about telecommuting, and effective ways of improving performance when salespeople are in remote locations. Buyers are turning more and more towards the web to make their purchases, and having a large workforce in a salesroom carries overhead costs that some of their online competitors may not have. It’s possible that the camaraderie shared by working in the salesroom carries its own form of positive reinforcement that is a financial benefit to the company. But if competitors begin to undercut them, they could look at ways of maintaining high performance through telecommuting. This could be done by having a live web page that shows active sales promotions, top sellers for the hour/day/week, and current commission due to the telemarketer. There are several methods that can be used when it comes to devising a plan or a method of viewing others perceived perceptions. There are many ways in which a person can see how people and/or animals think and get their perceived notions on how things go in life and in the world. In looking at the different ways that things are seen one may look at in three (3) or more ways, those being classical conditioning, social learning and operant conditioning are three very different learning methods. The three methods have the word conditioning in common. What is conditioning? Conditioning is the learning of specific patterns of behavior in the presence of well-defined backgrounds or environments. While classical and operant conditioning is basic forms of learning, social is a type of learned behavior that comes from interactions with different people.
Classical conditioning is a type of learning in which a person/animal learns to transfer a natural response from one particular event to another, previously neutral event or action. This is done by manipulating reflexes. Operant conditioning is a type of learning in which the likelihood of a behavior is increased or decreased by the use of reinforcement or punishment. Operant conditioning deals with more cognitive thought process. Social learning theory is a type learning in which a person/animal learns both negative and positive forms of reinforcement by things they perceive in society or social settings. These three forms of learning have similarities and differences. Their similarities are that they all produce basic phenomena. One such phenomenon is acquisition. All types of conditioning result in the inheritance of a behavior. One of the most famous of experiments that illustrates classical conditioning is Pavlov's Dogs. In this experiment, Pavlov sat behind a one-way mirror and controlled a bell after ringing of the bell, Pavlov gave the dog food. The key to operant conditioning is reinforcement. Reinforcement is when a stimulus is presented that increases the probability that the preceding response will recur in the future. If reinforcement is withheld, extinction will occur in operant conditioning. According to the Classical Learning Theory, we learn by trial and error, just as Skinner’s dog. Psychologist Donald Campbell is of the opinion that trial and error results in long lasting acquired behavior. Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura, the proponent of the Social Learning Theory, disagrees. He states: "Coping with the demands of everyday life would be exceedingly trying if one could arrive at solutions to problems only by actually performing possible options and suffering the consequences." [Bandura, 1977] Bandura moves beyond the Classical Learning Theory and delves deeper, with his Social Learning Theory.
His theory can be summarized as follows:
(a) He says that we learn by observing others.
(b) He focuses on the power of examples and the importance of role models.
(c) He stresses the importance of vicarious behavior as a means to modify behavior.
Bandura’s theory can be best illustrated by considering the example and the effect of the media. Bandura also said, in this regard, According to “Children and adults acquire attitudes, emotional responses, and new styles of conduct through filmed and televised modeling." Another caution is that TV viewing might create a violent reality, which has to be feared for its capacity to influence the way we deal with people every day. [Lefkowitz, Eron, Walder, Huesmann, 1977] According to his theory, three stages can be identified in the link between passive violence (just watching) and active violence (Actually carrying it out). These three stages are: (a) Attention (b) Retention (c) Motivation. The second stage is retention. According to Williams [1986] people learn things by vicariously experiencing them. A TV viewer can watch the most graphic, explicit and/or violent acts and experience the thrills, the fear, the strength and what not – all in the safety of his own room, in his own house, before his TV screen and, as mentioned before, people don’t just react to things, they interpret them. So a TV viewer interprets these TV experiences according to his cognitive and emotional levels, and then stores them in his memory. These memories may remain unused and untapped for years, they may contribute towards shaping future such active or passive experiences, or they may be used.
When a person vicariously learns something that affects him deeply, he will be tempted to try it out for him or herself and see what happens. Would he experience the same results as the on-screen protagonists? Here Bandura makes an important distinction when he says that “The highest level of observational learning is achieved by first organizing and rehearsing the modeled behavior symbolically, and then enacting it the widely accepted dictum that behavior is governed by its consequences fares better for anticipated than for actual consequences.” In other words, the person tries out the experience on the basis of what he perceives the outcome to be, rather than what may be the actual outcome. All these things can be reversed by the same processes. Thus new behavior can be conditioned via reinforcing appropriate behavior; by modeling appropriate behavior (often used for teaching social skills and assertiveness for example). People can be helped to increase their expectancies via observational learning as well. When a model shows they can overcome fear for example, this in turn helps the observer overcome their fear. Furthermore self-instructions can help people change their expectancies about outcomes. Social learning claims that they way that people think, plan, perceive and believe is an important part of learning. It also points out that many experiments are carried out on animals and that therefore the laws of learning they discover, while having some relevance to humans, are not complete or complex enough to account for more complex human behavior and learning. Social learning also claims that behaviorism ignores the social dimensions of learning, treating us as though we are individual animals. In humans, however, many reinforcements are social in nature.
Some of the differences between social learning, operant and classical conditioning lie in the extent to which reinforcement depends on the behavior of the learner. In classical conditioning, the learner is automatically reinforced. That is how it learns to respond to a once neutral stimulus. In operant conditioning, the learner must provide a correct response in order to receive the reinforcement. Another difference between the three forms of conditioning is the type of behavior to which each method applies. Classical conditioning applies to a behavior that is always wanted. It was Pavlov's purpose to have the dogs salivate on command. In operant conditioning, a behavior can be learned or extinguished. If you wanted to train a dog not to do something, you would use a form of punishment. Classical, social learning and operant conditioning are similar, but they do differ in a few ways. All are fairly reliable ways to teach a person or animal to act in a specific manor.
According to the case study of Joe Salantino the President of the Great Northern American Company he used a system of social learning behavior simply due to the fact that he used a reward system. Based on how well a person sold that month determined how much they made that week and overall how much they made that month. While some employees made $60,000 or lower some of his employees made upwards of $100,000 a year. His more lucrative employees made more money simply because they took more innovative approaches towards the customers and actually took upon themselves to subscribes to magazines and newspapers in the community where their subscribers lived so they could stay abreast of some of the happenings that went on in the town or surrounding areas so that when they were able to reach them they could talk to them about the comings and goings of the town, or someone’s wedding, or someone giving birth. They even went as far as sending gift baskets and other gifts so that it would appear as they were actually from that town and knew people there. That was just one innovative way of making sure they had repeat business. Others made sure that they were fast but efficient with businesses so as to not take too much of their time. They wanted businesses to know that they understood time was money and they didn’t want to waste their time. While some took to the internet to post that they were having a sale going on for a short amount of time. Prices would be slashed and deals such as a two for one deal would be posted, or a deal of 50% to 60% off would be posted for a specified time, and then the regular price would then be put back. They found that these tactics worked but only with certain workers. Some workers found that they could not do the job or found the rush of the job to be too much and would quit after only a few days.
Joe Salatino made it an environment to where if you could not handle a healthy amount of competition and a fast paced work environment then he would have to take certain actions. The perception that people saw about the company was one in which they would have to make sure they could be courteous, kind, and efficient or the business and the clientele would not continue to grow. He made it his personal mission to ensure that the business not only continued to grow but also expand beyond measure. He wanted to make that all his employees could perform the tasks that he had set before them that needed to be completed that day or for that month. Therefore he made sure that all aspects of the job could be covered by the right person. He wanted a person that could always close the deal so to speak and that the person could not only get the job done but could go above and beyond for the customers and make sure that they got exactly what they asked for and maybe something a little extra. Because of his tactics and his own innovation he not only made sure that the clients were taken care of but that he had repeat customers that would brag on his company and send their friends to his company as well. He made sure that everything and everyone was covered and did their jobs so that everyone would not only be happy but also be happy to come to work.
References
Bandura, Albert. (1977). Social Learning Theory. General Learning Press.
Lefkowitz, M.M., Eron, L.D., Walder, L.O., & Huesmann, L.R. (1977). Growing up to be violent. New York: Pergamon
Rosenstock, PhD, I., Strecher, PhD, V., & Becker, PhD, M. (1988). Social Learning Theory and the Health Belief Model. CONTRIBUTION OF HBM TO SELF-EFFICACY THEORY, p. 180.
Williams, T.M. (Ed.). (1986). The impact of television: A natural experiment involving three towns. New York: Academic Press.

Perception is the process by which the individual selects, organizes, interprets and responds to information (Hellriegel & Slocum, 2011). Employees are constantly exposed to a variety of information, whether from personal experience or from co workers. However this information is obtained, this information is processed in their minds and organized to form concepts pertaining to what is sensed or experienced. There are two main factors that influence what an individual perceives: External factors and Internal Factors.
Extenal factors are factors that come from culture rather than personal observation, that enable perception and includes: (a) Size, the larger the object); (b) Intensity, the more intense an external factor, like bright lights and loud noises; (c) Contrast, factors that stand out. These are unexpected, therefore, more noticeable; (d) Motion, a moving factor stands out more from a stationary factor; and (e) Repetition, a repeated factor that will eventually stand out. (Hellriegel & Slocum, 2011)
Internal factors are factors that influence what the individual sees. Three types of internal factors that affect what a person perceives are: (a) Personality, (b) Learning and (c) Motivation.
Person Perception is the process by which an individual attributes characteristics or traits to other people. Many people perceive others based on information told to them by other people and at that point the damage has been done. When prejudgment has been done, this is called a perceptual error. However, to prevent forming percept perceptual error. However, to prevent forming perceptions of a coworker, the individual should try to understand the cause of their own and others’ behaviors. This is called the attribution process. (Hellriegel & Slocum, 2011)
As president of GNA, Joe should make sure that the employees have a little understanding of perception and attributes, Joe could address the importance of these by having training that explains these perceptions and attributes, and provide real- world examples. Then in the training, it would be a good idea to get the employees engaged. Even after the training is over, Joe could revisit the topic with the group on a periodic basis; a more needed basis if they is conflict among the twenty employees.
Operant Conditioning
In Joe’s situation with his employees, the most appropriate learning theory would be the operant conditioning learning theory. Operant Condition, sometimes referred to as instrumental conditioning, is a method of learning that occurs through rewards and punishments for behavior (Cherry, 2012). Operant conditioning has been defined also as a process by which individuals learn voluntary behavior. Voluntary behaviors are called operants because they operate, or have some influence on the environment. What this means is, an individual’s capability can be influenced by reinforcements from their leader. If the reinforcements are negative, then the employee may not work to their full potential, whereas, if the reinforcement is positive, then the employee will try to exceed their potential. In Joe’s case, he rewarded his staff with bonuses and high pay salaries. (Hellriegel & Slocum, 2011)
Some key concepts in operant conditioning are reinforcement and punishment.
Reinforcement is any event that strengthens or increase the behavior it follows. There are two types of reinforces:
1. Positive reinforces are favorable events or outcomes that are present after the behavior. In situations that reflect positive reinforcement, a response or behavior is strengthened by the addition of something, such as praise or a direct reward.
2. Negative reinforces involve the removal of an unfavorable events or outcomes after the display of a behavior. In these situations, a response is strengthened by the removal of something considered unpleasant.
In both of these cases of reinforcement, the behavior increases. (Cherry, 2012)
Punishment on the other hand, is the presentation of an adverse event or outcome that causes a decrease in the behavior it follows. There are two kinds of punishments:
1. Positive punishment sometimes referred to as punishment by application, involves the presentation of an unfavorable event or outcome in order to weaken the response it follows.
2. Negative punishment, also known as punishment by removal, occurs when a favorable event or outcome is removed after a behavior occurs.
In both of these cases of punishment, the behavior decrease. (Cherry, 2012)

Case Study
1. Discuss how Joe could address the importance of understanding how people form perceptions and make attributions about others with his employees.
As a President of Great Northern it is Mr. Salatino’s is accountable for building up, influencing and engineering the organizations sales team. Perception is a declaration of the way individuals sift, arrange and interpret sensory information and attribution is an explanation of how individuals respond to the actions of others (Hellriegel & Slocomb, 2011). Mr. Salatino needs to demonstrate how perceptions are influenced in relations to his business. This would require him developing a model for his sales team to use as selective screening when seeking potential customers. Within the model he should focus on the external factors that relate to his organizations goals. These factors consist of as size, intensity, contrast, motion, repetition and novelty and familiarity. Then, internal factors should be infused into the equation; these factors include personality, learning, and motivation. Combined, both internal and external factors create importance of perception into employees.
Mr. Salatino is responsible as an effective leader to ensure they have an accurate perception of the organizational goals so that his sales team will be able to execute effective decisions in relation to customer sales (Duggan). In an effort to do so, he could address the importance of understanding how people form perceptions and make attribution through observing his employees behaviors, as well as the environmental conditions that affect their behaviors. As an effective leader, he would attempt to sway external events in order to pilot employee behaviors (Hellriegel & Slocum).
Through implementation of weekly mandatory workshops with his sales teams Mr. Salatino could also communicate keys to perception and attribution through focusing on the core competencies. These competencies fused concept of knowledge, skills and abilities (KSA) required by an individual, team or organization for effective performance. The most essential being ethics, self, diversity, across cultures, communication, teams and change all of which contribute to the assurance an organizational is ran effectively. Essentially, competencies focus on the significance of all employees (Hellriegel & Slocum). Through feedback and comparison from my suggested weekly sales meetings where employees can discuss and share results, vital information can be revealed to ultimately implement change.
2. Evaluate which learning theory (either operant conditioning, social learning theory, or the learning theory you researched in Week 3) would be most appropriate for Joe to apply in this situation and explain why.
As President of Great Northern it would benefit Mr. Salatino, his sales team and the organization if he applied the social learning theory. This theory requires knowledge obtainment through the mental internalization of information by observing and imitating others which is ideal in sales. Social learning theory is inclusive of five characteristics, symbolizing, forethought, vicarious learning and self-control (Hellrigel &Slocum). By Mr. Salatino leading by example and sharing the results with his sales team gives them a mental picture of how they are essentially the back bone of the organization and are a directly linked to his success, the organization’s success and their own success. It is clearly a motivating factor to know that your company’s president monitors the overall success of the organization on how much he is able to pays you.
3.) Discuss ways that Joe could apply the learning theory you selected to improve employees’ performance.
Through the implementation of the five essential characteristics of social learning theory Mr. Salatino could improve employee’s performance. First, through the forethought gained at the suggested weekly meetings. These meetings will focus on competencies and the desired responses of situations expressed through the communication between Mr. Salatino and his sales teams. When the sales team is presented with scenarios they can reflect on skills, knowledge and abilities they have already been acquired (Hellriegel & Slocum). By creating opportunities for operational learning it allows for the sales team to see how things are done through video, articles, or books. The sales team is able to mimic what they have observed and be able to execute what they have learned. This is an ideal method for Mr. Salatino to utilize and incorporate professional development (Cushard, 2011).
Mr. Salatino will need to focus on vicarious learning at my suggested weekly meetings as well. Observation through open and honest communication at the weekly meetings and the continued reinforcement of the previously discussed competencies essentially promotes overall organizational effectiveness without reliance on potentially costly trial and error. The sales team is also able to inherently reap the benefits of reward for behavior through vicarious learning. Mr. Salatino himself believes that employees who have established solid relationships with their customers basically earn significantly more money than those who are unable to foster positive relationships with customers and this concept feeds into his working theory (Hellriegel & Slocum).
The self-control factor would benefit Mr. Salatino, Great Northern and the employees. Self-control implements goal setting, empowerment and can promote opportunities to increase performance through tutorials and workshops opportunities presented at weekly meetings. The self-control factor gives the sales team empowerment to determine their own goals and ways of reaching them to acquiring their desired needs. It in turn, it relinquishes Mr. Salatino from micromanaging a fully competent sales teams (Hellriegel & Solcum, 2011).