Political

Great work! M. The political frame’s foundation is based on the fact that conflict arises from the allocation of scarce resources. In this situation, the limited resources are time and money. Each retail store has a maximum amount of funds which can be allocated towards payroll. This means that depending on the employees hourly wages there is limited hours to be distributed among them. Distribution of hours do not apply to full time employees, as they are guaranteed 40 per week, but there is a collective maximum for part-time employees. The store manager (Francesco) needs to plan the distribution of hours through scheduling in such ways that the store is running near perceived maximum efficiency. To understand the situation from a political frame, we need to examine it from the perspective of the three parties involved, the store manager (Francesco), VP of Human Resources (Helena), and the store recruiter (Marta).

Francesco doesn’t want to hire an employee with a learning disability due to the perception that it will use up limited resources (time & money) less effectively then an employee without a disability. He wants his store to be the best in order to move himself up the corporate ladder. For example, his goal may be to become a district or regional manager. The political environment here is that there are several stores within each region, meaning there is going to be many store managers competing for district manager positions. This goes back to the idea of limited resources, as there can only be so many district managers. The success of Francesco’s store is highly dependent on his employees. It is impossible for him to do everything on his own. In order to demonstrate that he is a viable candidate to move up the corporate ladder, his store needs to be in a top list. Taking Francesco’s goals into account it is not difficult to see why he was reluctant to hire this candidate. His strategy at avoiding hiring this employee was to form an informal coalition with Marta (store recruiter) and convince her that he has a better candidate to screen. However, by not providing the opportunity for the learning disability candidate, he broke the Human Rights Code of Ontario, which states, among other things, that no one shall be discriminated against a handicap by a potential employer. In order to avoid the pressure of this external political control, Francesco should have screened the candidate, and if he still did not want to hire them, he could have based it of some other reason. This way, it would show that he did make an effort to hire them, and would have worked more to his advantage then ignoring the candidate. Higher management would have noticed he is making an effort to fulfil the company’s equal opportunity initiative, rather than working against it in this case.

Marta, the store recruiter is placed in a position in which pressure is applied from two opposing parties. First there is the HR manager (Helena) whose agenda is to fulfil the company’s equal employment opportunity initiative. However the problem is Helena works from another office, and is never at the store, yet Marta needs to report to her. On the other front is pressure applied from the store manager to not hire this candidate. Even though the store manager is not the boss of Marta, she works with him at the same location, and therefore needs to maintain a positive relationship with him. In order to avoid conflict with the store manager, Marta decided to screen the candidate that the store manager preferred. However, she should have bargained with the store manager to give the learning disability candidate a chance. A possible middle ground could have been to hire this candidate and provide them with very limited hours. This would leave some available resources for the store manager to hire their preferred candidate as well. The problem is that no bargaining occurred.

The HR manager Helena has an agenda to try and make sure that each store helps fulfil the equal employment opportunity initiative. She needs to report to the VP or HR with information about this initiative. Her goal in this situation is to demonstrate that she provided an opportunity for a store to increase their workplace diversity. However, Helena made a critical mistake by informing the store recruiter (Marta) and store manager that the candidate has a learning disability. By providing this information she framed the situation towards discrimination. She should have just contacted the store recruiter and told them to screen a potential candidate. This way, she would be able to fulfil her agenda, avoided conflict, and any form of bargaining. The candidate would have had a fair interview, and would either be hired or rejected based on factors not related to their learning disability. This is an acctual solution to this type of problem, however might have not worked in this particular case because they have some pre-screening tools (questionare) that can indicate the disability and only knowing and expecting someone to have such a disability can make for to bypass the assumed negative results of the pre-sreening.