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Discussion Board: Changing Promotion Systems
Question 1. What is the likely cause of CSD’s problems?
Bioglass’ promotion strategy includes four levels of sales associates and four levels of
managerial positions, wherein an employee from the lowest level of sales can reach the highest
level of management, as displayed in the case of Tom Caldwell (Heneman III, Judge, &
Kammeyer-Mueller, 2019). Despite being the top salesman, Caldwell struggled to cope with the
responsibilities of the new management role, and the person who moved up from the third level
sales position to replace Caldwell’s top-level position found it difficult to manage the bigger
clients Tom had, ultimately losing two huge corporate accounts. Evidently, the current system of
sequential internal promotion in place has not worked out well for either of the two employees.
The reason behind why the Tom and his replacement were not able to cope with the new
positions is not due to any fault of their own; rather, it reflects poorly on the company’s
promotion strategy as employees are being promoted based solely on hierarchical progression or
how long they have been with the company as opposed to possession of required KSAOs for the
job (Heneman III, Judge, & Kammeyer-Mueller, 2019, p. 517). Furthermore, it demonstrates a
lack of identification of potential and development of capabilities on the part of the company
(Phikiso & Tangeh, 2017), which was forced to keep Tom in the managerial position to maintain
their image while spending a fortune on expensive management courses for Tom. As Desai,
Lockett, & Paton (2015) point out, however, some risk in leadership succession is to be expected
due to the occurrence of asymmetric information between the hiring team and the managerial
candidate (since the latter know more about their own capabilities than the former). Further, they
suggest that relying on individuals who have had experience in dealing with only one kind of
party (in this case, the top sales level deals only with big clients) is likely to result in these
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individuals not learning their new responsibilities and using only their existing skills and
practices even in their new managerial roles (as Tom demonstrated by being unable to handle
anyone other than his clients) (Desai, Lockett, & Paton, 2015).
Question 2. How might CSD, and Bioglass more generally, make better promotion
decisions in the future? Be specific.
The best way for Bioglass to improve their promotion decisions would be for them to
maintain a talent management/succession or human resource management system to keep track
of each employee’s skills, talents and capacities, with frequent updates of the employees’
performance in order to understand what positions (if any) could become potentially better fits
for employees in the future (Heneman III, Judge, & Kammeyer-Mueller, 2019, p. 518). In order
to successfully create a succession plan, it is necessary for the company to identify talent suitable
for higher positions well in advance, develop and evaluate those with potential, and create
strategies to retain employees and upcoming leaders, in order to avoid sudden turnover and loss
of talent (Phikiso & Tangeh, 2017). Various scholars also propose that, to encourage employees
to develop their capabilities and potential by succession planning, an understanding of the
influence of the job demands-resource model (JD-R) and the self-determination theory (SDT) is
required; the former suggesting the influence of task demands and availability of resources and
the latter focusing on psychological needs and internal motivation in improving employee
performance and developing capacities (Ali & Mehreen, 2019a). In short, the company needs to
ensure that its succession management strategy includes leadership assessment, job rotations, and
development programs to identify and evaluate employees’ who can be promoted to leadership
positions and take the place of those positions left vacant (Groves, 2019).
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Question 3. In general, what role should performance appraisals play in internal selection
decisions? Are there some cases in which they are more relevant than others? Explain.
Performance appraisals (PA) and succession planning or internal promotion decisions are
found to be heavily correlated in contributing to employee performance, specifically in the
service sector (Ali & Mehreen, 2019b). Their purpose is to document employee performance,
justify future personnel decisions, and motivate employees (Rubin & Edwards, 2020). Some
scholars suggest that PA systems work best when properly designed to define roles, increase
ratee satisfaction, improve organizational commitment, and encourage employees to seek
feedback about their performance and clarity regarding their roles (Iqbal et al., 2019); that is, the
effectiveness of PA systems can be determined based on the definition of their purpose and
communication of results to employees not to demotivate, but to clarify their roles.
However, Davis, Cox, & Baucus (2019) point out that performance is not always a good
basis upon which to place internal decisions, as both performance and aspirations are relative and
constantly changing depending on the success of the company, while too strong an emphasis on
high performance and goals tends to encourage misconduct and unethical behavior amongst the
lower levels. Further, some studies show that performance appraisals given by supervisors tend
to exhibit some errors in judgement such as the “halo effect” by which an employee’s
performance in one task is assumed to be the same in all tasks (which could explain why Tom
was given the managerial position despite only being good at sales) (Lin & Kellough, 2019).
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References
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Ali, Z. & Mehreen, A. (2019b). Understanding succession planning as a combating strategy for
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https://doi-org.ezproxy.liberty.edu/10.1108/JAMR-09-2018-0076
Davis, M., Cox, M., & Baucus, M. (2019). Managerial aspirations and suspect leaders: The
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Heneman III, H. G., Judge, T. A., & Kammeyer-Mueller, J. D. (2019). Staffing Organizations
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