Claudia Goldin Econ 490 fall 2019

Triangle model In the following blog post I would like to write about the triangle model. This describes when two principals don’t see eye to eye on what counts on good performance by the agent.  I could recognize this situation at my work in an insurance company. At the one hand, we had the manager. He was located in a different building and my team leader only had meetings with him every month because he was very busy. On the other side of the triangle model was the works council. All of these mentioned parties have different interests, and sometimes this can result in problems. These three parties try to meet as much as they can and discussed the topics of the company.  For the manager, it is most important that the returns are high and that the company is constantly growing. Moreover, for the manager it is necessary that the company works on every contract very fast, thus employees have a deadline to finish a contract of a client within three working days. Oth...

Conflict in work environment In this following blog post I will describe a conflict situation at my work. First of all, it is to mention that when different people with a different age and different background work together then there is potential for conflict.  The bureau at my work was very huge. Every department had only one room and in every room were about 50 people. This raises the potential for conflicts at work. For example, choosing the music can create conflict because all ages have different preferences. Another example is that some people’s working style are loud and others silent workers.  One of the biggest conflicts at work happened between two colleagues who were the same age. Both of them were around 60 years old and very close to retirement. For that reason, they didn’t care what they say in team meetings because they already signed their retirement contracts and act very intuitively how they thought it is right in the situation. Moreover, they w...

Receiving discipline at work  First I would like to start to talk about punishment in organizations. In my experience, discipline had never had a positive effect because people feel attacked and are not productive at work anymore. The workers are only thinking about the punishment and not on work.  For example, we had a team meeting and got a lot of negative feedback although everybody tried their best. The result of this was that all members of the department were angry after the meeting and reflected on what happened together. Everybody felt treated unfair and they didn’t continue their work because all their thoughts were focused on the negative feedback. They felt like the team leader didn’t see the effort in their work and as a reaction they did nothing productive.   In comparison, we also had good team meetings where we got presented good results and the progress we made. Moreover, the team leader specified what was working well, which also raised ...

Team production with gift exchange In the following blog post I would like to talk about gift exchange in group work in university. At my business university in Vienna teachers have a main focus on this type of work because they think that it is very important for our future working life to work with different people together and learn how to coordinate. I had last semester 8 different groups at the same time, which was very hard to coordinate, but now I have a lot of experience in working together in groups. It is very interesting to see that in a short time period everybody finds their position in the group. Quickly there is a leader who makes a facebook or whats app group and someone decides which work every student will do. For me gift exchange is defined as giving something to a person or a group for example effort or time and not expecting to get back the same. My favorite group was last semester in my human resource management class. Here I want ...