HIM 305 Week 1 –
Competency Assignment: Evaluate the Principles of Management
Instructions: Study Fayol’s Principles of Management in your LaTour book, Chapter 23. Read the scenarios on the worksheet below and evaluate each situation to determine which principle is being addressed, violated, or ignored in each situation. You must state at least one of the principals in your answer and explain your evaluation in at least a few sentences. Note that some of the scenarios are examples of appropriate management behavior while others are not. You need to reflect your recognition of this in your evaluation.
| Scenario | Evaluation |
| Lucy arrives late to work several times each month. The supervisor ignores this because Lucy is the best coder she has. Sheryl arrived late this week for the first time, and even though she had a very valid reason, the supervisor called her into her office and gave her a verbal warning. | EXAMPLE: This situation shows the violation of the management principle of Equity. This principle states that all employees should be treated equally. Lucy is getting special treatment because she is a favorite. Sheryl should not receive a verbal warning for one infraction if Lucy does not get disciplined for consistently arriving late. This will create morale issues, not only for Sheryl, but for others observing this unfair treatment. |
| Human Resources at a metropolitan hospital has set the entry level salary for medical coders to be the same as that of their small hospital in a rural setting. The HIM Director has given HR some information about the shortage of qualified coders in this city, and the difference in rental rates and home prices in the city compared to the small town. HR states that they are not changing the entry level pay. | |
| Lori is an RHIT and for ¾ of her day she is a Discharge Analyst. The last 2 hours of her day she does scanning. She is grateful that her manager arranged this work load so that she could be classified as full time. The hard part of her day is that she reports to the HIM Director while she is a Discharge Analyst but when she is scanning she reports to the Supervisor of Operations. Sometimes these two managers give her conflicting feedback and also make it difficult for her to prioritize because their demands sometimes conflict as well. | |
| Lisa, a supervisor in HIM, is known to be difficult sometimes. Sometimes when she is in the breakroom with just one employee, she will talk negatively about another employee. Sometimes Lisa will also insult an employee in the middle of a staff meeting. She thinks this is a good way to get that employee to perform better. | |
| Sue, the Director of HIM, is often heard encouraging staff to find what needs to be done and go ahead and do it. She also lets them know that they can take on projects (such as rearranging the copy room) when they have free time. She sometimes announces in staff meetings that if any staff member has a good idea for an improvement within the department they should always come and tell her about it. | |
| Sarah delegated a project to one of her staff, Nan. Nan was excited about the project because she was getting bored with her job and was hoping for a new learning opportunity and she believed she was ready for more responsibility. For the most part the project went well, but she was sometimes frustrated. At times during the project she had to ask her co-workers to do something but some of them felt that they shouldn’t take orders from Nan. Instead they always went back to Sarah to ask if they really had to do the task. | |
| Karen, the HIM Operations Supervisor, is responsible for merging duplicate MPI records. She likes to do this each Friday afternoon, however, sometimes she doesn’t have time. She performs the entire process, even the clerical aspects of the process. Her expertise is really only needed for the analysis process and the actual merging in the system, but she has always done all of the parts of the process herself. | |
| The CEO of Community Hospital always calls an all-staff meeting in the auditorium each year to announce the current strategic plan and discusses how it matches with the hospital mission statement. In management meetings, the CEO reminds all managers to discuss annual goals and encourage discussion about how that department’s work relates to the organizational goals. | |
| Sue, the Director of HIM, likes to do things to make work fun. She celebrates successes, gives kudos to staff in front of others, and works to develop skills in staff. She sends staff to HIM conferences as often as she can. Her department has a low turn-over rate. | |
| Karen, the HIM Operations Supervisor, had a tough week. One of her staff was late 3 of the 5 days, two of her staff were fighting in the middle of the department on Tuesday, and one of the coders spent half the day on the phone making personal calls on Thursday. She was so frustrated but she just tried to ignore all of this and hope that next week would be a better week. | |
| Jamie, the Director of HIM, always insists that the department is organized, clean, and neat. She asks that everyone organize their desks each night before the leave. She makes it known that if anyone feels they need anything to keep them organized, such as bins, trays, folders, etc. that they should come and see her. |
