The Impact of COVID-19 in Organisations

The purpose of this qualitative assignment:

The purpose of this case study is to integrate and implement insights from the course towards understanding and addressing employee and managerial challenges in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The coronavirus and the subsequent lockdowns imposed on the economy have presented organisations with many challenges, both from the management’s perspective and in terms of the employee experience. In this work, you will be asked to conduct two interviews (1 with an employee, and 1 with a junior manager) to obtain information on the challenges they have been facing due to the pandemic. You should then use this information together with the theories, models and concepts you learned in the seminar to understand and discuss the challenges of the current era for employees and managers.

Your findings and relevant course learnings should be presented in the form of a written case study. Please follow the guidelines outlined below.

Guidelines:

2. The submission should be made in word-file and should not be longer than 5 pages

   ( Times New Roman, size 12, double-spaced, not including references and appendices)

3. Please submit your case study on Moodle, under the “Case Study Submission” link

4.  A good case study is one that combines the relevant seminar materials/readings and theoretical concepts and models learned in the course, with the information  obtained from the interviews.

5. The interviewees can come from any organisation and industry of your choice.  One of your interviewees should be an employee of an organisation and the other should be in a managerial position (please note: first-time or junior managers may be easier to gain access to than more senior managers).

      Convenience sampling (finding participants who are already within your network or who come from an organisation where you already know someone) is perfectly acceptable for this case study. Since the interviews need not be conducted face to face, you may also conduct interviews with individuals working abroad.

6.   In order to help you ask meaningful questions and draw relevant conclusions, we suggest that you first reflect on the topics covered in the course in Weeks 1-5 and formulate a general research question you would like to address in relation to COVID-19 in organisations – e.g. specific challenges that organisations were facing during lockdown or when working in hybrid manner, the differences and similarities between the way managers and employees experienced the pandemic, challenges to organisational fairness when (returning to) working in hybrid manner, work-family conflict, etc.

Case study marking criteria

The case study counts towards 30% of your overall course grade and will be marked in line with the Department of Management Graduate Marking criteria (available on Moodle).

To assist you with your planning of the assignment, please see below for the breakdown of how each section of the Case study will count towards your grade.

1. Quality of the interview questions  (10% of the Mark)

      In order to learn about the COVID-related challenges, you must conduct in-depth interviews with 1 manager and 1 employee. You can select 2 different interviewees from the same organisation or from various industries. Prepare for the interview and think about what questions you want to ask in relation to the topic of your case study. The questions should deal with the topics of the course: the role of the manager, personality, motivation, attitudes and job satisfaction, or organisational fairness. Prepare general questions from which you can learn about changes that have occurred, experiences, feelings, thoughts, expectations, behaviors, motivations, performance at work, and coping strategies of employees and managers. We suggest starting with introductory and thawing questions and then delving deeper into the interviewees’ experiences. For more information on interview questions, you can use Google’s website on structured interviews and the additional information about conducting research interviews covered in the seminar in Week 3 of LT. Please include the questions and transcription of the interviews in the appendices of your case study submission. In addition, in the work itself, a part should be devoted to the preparation of the interviews, including the following details: a description of the interviewees and the organization in which they work (without identifying details – keep the organisations and interviewees anonymous), an explanation of the rationale behind the interview questions (including sample questions), and how the interviews were conducted (e.g. face-to-face or virtual, interview duration).

      In the fourth seminar that will take place on the 8^th February, we will discuss the preparation for the interviews and the initial insights you may have. This will be an opportunity to learn about the interview preparation process, so it will be helpful for you to come to the class with a preliminary idea of your questions, so that you can receive feedback. We also encourage you to come to the class with your two interviewees in mind, as the in-class exercise will include interview planning.

2. Integrative analysis of the interviews (80% of the Mark) 

• Read the transcripts of the interviews, searching for and marking in them themes, comments, statements related to the topics of the course. Identify points that were repeated in the interviews in the context of the relevant course topics (management, personality, motivation, attitudes etc.). You should discuss your interview themes in connection to 2 topics discussed in the course. After processing the points, select the main challenges from a range of different topics of the course that you identified following the analysis of the interviews. Present each of the challenges using a short description of the issue alongside specific quotes from the interviews that illustrate it. (20%)
• Explain each challenge using concepts, theories, models, or findings, learned in the course. It is important to establish the explanation for each of the challenges also using the core (and additional) reading materials whenever relevant. Reading will allow you to deepen the discussion and expand the scope for each challenge. Please quote and refer to the sources you used. (40%)
• After presenting the challenges identified through your interviews, discuss the differences and similarities between the ways in which they impacted your interviewers and the extent to which they are expressed by both of your respondents. For example, you may wish to draw comparisons between the challenges of employees and those of managers, highlighting personality differences etc. Compare the similarities and differences and explain this with the help of the models, theories, and concepts. (20%)

3. Action items (10% of the Mark).

• Formulate recommendations for actions addressing each challenge. Try to provide at least 1 action item per challenge (for the employee and/or manager/organisation) based on theories, models, or findings learned in the course (seminar + reading materials). Regarding each recommendation, it is necessary to specify what the idea is, what is the expected result from the implementation of the idea, advantages, disadvantages and implications, and how it can be implemented in organisations. Discuss the expected difficulties in implementing these recommendations. (10%)