CHAPTER 4

A Work Assignment ­
Role-Play in Communicating with Dignity

Jyoti Bachani and Donna Hicks

This is a case study to demonstrate and discuss the role of dignity in a routine and common organizational situation, a supervisor assigning work. The primary lesson from this exercise will be to learn about the concept of dignity, its ten elements, and how it can be upheld or eroded in workplace interactions between people with a power difference in their roles. The setting is a college, where both undergraduate and graduate courses are taught. The college is divided into schools, such as school of business, school of education, school of arts and sciences, and so on. Within each school, faculty are assigned to departments, typically along subject areas, such as department of Marketing, Finance, Management, and so on, within the School of Business. Each department is led by a department chair, who has the responsibility for assigning courses to the faculty and ensuring that all courses offered in that subject area are staffed as per the criteria agreed upon at the college level.

At this college, each instructor has an assigned course load of six courses to teach every year. The instructors typically teach in their own area of expertise, although there may be some exceptions to that, such as a requirement to teach in certain college-wide programs such as the seminar in great books program or a summer, an experimental course in a month-long January-term, where faculty can take students for travel courses or offer something innovative they want to teach. Usually, faculty preferences for scheduled time of classes and locations where they teach are honored in assigning courses to them. The department chair must also keep in mind that teaching meets the accreditation agency’s criteria for a quality program.

The department chair is a faculty member appointed by the Dean of the school. The Chair gets extra pay and reduced teaching requirement for taking on this administrative role. The role is rotated over time. The administrative duties of the department chair include several operational matters, among which an important one is scheduling, that is, assigning courses to teach to the faculty in their department. Some of the other duties of the Chair are: hiring temporary instructors needed to teach courses that cannot be staffed by the permanent faculty, training and reviewing the temporary faculty, running department meetings to handle ongoing operations, liaising with other department chairs, program directors of various degree programs, facilities to have physical classrooms assigned as per enrollments, creating a master schedule that is up to date and accurate, and other similar operational matters.

Although this work-assignment dialog between a department chair and a faculty member occurred by e-mail over a period of three months, it can be used for a role-play in class. The medium of e-mail gives access to data about this in a way that would not be possible without recording real conversations. Hence, it is a reliable exchange that is useful for a rich discussion of the idea of dignity. Before the dialog is reproduced, let us learn about dignity and why that really matters.

The rest of the chapter has the following sections: (1) a perspective on human dignity in the workplace, (2) The dialog, where e-mails exchanged are reported, (3) some suggested discussion questions, and (4) lessons learned from the exercise and conclusions.

A Perspective on Dignity

Organizations are one of the greatest human inventions as they are a way to organize collective human activity. They enable us to accomplish what we cannot do alone, be it building bridges or finding cures for deadly diseases. Yet, a majority of modern organizations have become dysfunctional where people routinely feel stressed, if not trapped, in their roles. The very language is one where humans are seen as and called human-resources, replaceable parts in the machine by similar resources. Human beings are so much more than just resources for organizations to accomplish their goals. Somewhere along the way, instead of organizations existing to serve human well-being goals, organizations have become the dominant player with humans existing to serve their goals. This role reversal needs to be addressed so that human beings are not in the service of mindless pursuit of profits and productivity by organizations.

Organizations and management need to recognize the primacy of human dignity and societal well-being as core purposes that come ahead of profits, productivity, or other economistic concerns. Leaders need to maintain dignity threshold (see Chapter 1). One way to restore dignity in organizational settings is to learn to recognize its violations as they happen. People assume a variety of roles at work in organizational contexts. Organizations are structured with hierarchical structures that have built-in power differences between different roles. The power differences often permit tacit or explicit approval for people in higher power roles to use their power freely over those subordinate to them in the hierarchy. If the people holding positions of power do not have good self-awareness or a clear moral or ethical code imposed to limit how they use power, there is potential for abuse of power. This abuse of power leads to fear in people and a stripping away of their basic human dignity. Routine interactions between people in boss-subordinate roles are a major source of stress.

How can organizations promote fair interactions without abuse of power and be proactive in protecting human dignity? One way that organizations can ensure this is by promoting a culture where human dignity is center stage (see Chapter 2). Every employee, regardless of their role and position in the hierarchy, explicitly agrees to preserve their own and others’ dignity. Dignity was explicitly developed as a concept by Donna Hicks. She offers the following ten essential elements of human dignity, which would be useful to everyone who wants to protect dignity in the workplace:

• Acceptance of Identity—Approach people as neither inferior nor superior to you; give others the freedom to express their authentic selves without fear of being negatively judged; interact without prejudice or bias, accepting how race, religion, gender, class, sexual orientation, age, disability, and so on, are at the core of their identities. Assume they have integrity.
• Recognition—Validate others for their talents, hard work, thoughtfulness, and help; be generous with praise; give credit to others for their contributions, ideas, and experience.
• Acknowledgment—Give people your full attention by listening, hearing, validating, and responding to their concerns, and what they have been through.
• Inclusion—Make others feel that they belong at all levels of relationship (family, community, organization, nation).
• Safety—Put people at ease at two levels: physically, where they feel free of bodily harm; and psychologically, where they feel free of concern about being shamed or humiliated, that they feel free to speak without fear of retribution.
• Fairness—Treat people justly, with equality, and in an evenhanded way, according to agreed-upon laws and rules.
• Independence—Empower people to act on their own behalf so that they feel in control of their lives and experience a sense of hope and possibility.
• Understanding—Believe that what others think matters; give them the chance to explain their perspectives, express their points of view; actively listen in order to understand them.
• Benefit of the Doubt—Treat people as trustworthy; start with the premise that others have good motives and are acting with integrity.
• Accountability—Take responsibility for your actions; if you have violated the dignity of another, apologize; make a commitment to change hurtful behaviors.

  (Reproduced from http://drdonnahicks.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Essential-Elements-of-Dignity-Hicks.pdf)

Human dignity violations occur in organizational settings for both leaders and subordinates. If people are aware of the concept of dignity and committed to preserving it, for themselves and their colleagues within organizations, these are preventable.

The case study provided is one example of bringing awareness of ­dignity in a common work situation between two individuals with a power difference in their roles, dealing with a very routine situation of assigning work. Read the dialog or role-play it, and then try to analyze it against the ten elements of dignity that have been described. Engaging with it will help with raising awareness and understanding of the concept of dignity, and how to prevent its violation at the workplace.

Role-Play Dialog

This role-play is developed from an e-mail exchange between a department chair and a faculty member, on the topic of assigning courses that faculty member has to teach in the coming academic year. The medium of e-mail allows us to capture the dialog in its specific details. Student volunteers can play the roles while the rest of the class is observing them, followed by a discussion about it. Another way it can be used as a class exercise is to have students in the class be divided into three groups to debate the situation, with one group being the Chair, the other the faculty, and the third can be the observer. Instead of individual volunteers, doing this as a group allows the focus to remain on the conduct of organizational routines, rather than on personalities of the faculty or Chair roles. This example provides a basis for discussion on how such situations may potentially be handled. Students can experience it first hand, rather than just read about it, and they can also share their experience of taking on one or the other role and what they learned from that.

Typically, the faculty are informed about six months prior to the start of the new academic year what they will be teaching for the ­coming year. This allows faculty time to prepare for their courses, order textbooks and readers, design courses to meet learning goals for course and for the programs, as per the commitments to the accreditation agencies and ensure that students get a uniform institutionalized learning experience regardless of the individual teacher who teaches the course. Newly created courses, or courses revised substantially as part of the program revisions, require a great deal of fresh preparation time. Hence, the sooner the department chair assigns and communicates the expected teaching load, the better prepared the instructor can be for delivering it.

The observers may further divide their roles into various other ­parties affected by this organizational decision making, with subgroups ­representing other peer instructors, the dean that both the Chair and instructor report to, the students or just future supervisors and workers.

In this dialog: Faculty member e-mails are in italics, department chair e-mails in regular font and with context explained in parenthesis.

Faculty:

Hello Chair-Name,

Thank you for asking me about my teaching preferences.

It is virtually impossible for me to articulate these in the abstract beyond saying that I have expertise to teach strategy, global business, management of technology and innovation, and heavy-quantitative courses. I am flexible in my scheduling preferences and happy to teach what needs to be taught keeping in mind the considerations important to achieve AACSB coverage ratios and other objectives that may determine the staffing needs.

It would be helpful for me to see a spreadsheet of the courses that need to be staffed, as we used to do in the past, so I can offer my preferences from the choices at hand. Possible?

I am happy to teach undergraduates and graduate students. I am happy to teach in the summer. I am happy to teach in the off-campus, Transglobal, Hybrid, and f2f programs on campus.

Faculty-name

Chair: on Mon, Oct 3, 2016 at 9:21 PM

Faculty-Name,

Let me suggest some things and perhaps you can choose among these. Here is what I have:

Summer GMAN509H W, GMAN 317 M, BUSAD 140

Autumn GMAN712 in mid­Oct, GMAN512H W (you cannot do both because there is a time conflict with the first hybrid class)

Winter GMAN512 Sat

Spring GMAN509 TH, MGT420, and 3 back-to-back sections of BUSAD140 MWF in the morning.

May also have a TTH morning BUSAD140 section in the Spring.

Chair-Name.

Faculty: On Mon, Oct 3, 2016 at 10:56 PM

Thanks for the choices. Please can you give me the locations and times for these courses, and start and end dates. I know that the terms are not the same for undergrads and graduate courses, so thinking in terms of quarters for undergrad courses is confusing without the dates.

Chair: On Tue, Oct 4, 2016 at 10:10 AM

All the courses are on campus except Spring GMAN509 on TH, which is in Off-campus-1. I trust you can look up the academic calendars online, which is what I would do to provide you the start and end dates.

MGT420 is tentatively scheduled for 5/8/18­6/9/18—I am checking on that and can confirm later.

Chair-Name

Faculty: On Tue, Oct 4, 2016 at 2:18 PM

Chair-Name,

The academic calendars do not provide the class times or Transglobal dates and schedule. Are there no courses Off-Campus?

I also need information about the classes to see whether these are with the same cohort or different cohorts because the department expectation is that I will not be teaching GMAN509 and GMAN512 back to back to the same cohort. The earlier process when a spreadsheet was provided with cohort numbers, locations, and times for the classes, allowed full transparency to choose meaningfully. To be asked to choose based on partial and incomplete information leaves room for potential mis­calculations and conflict that is best avoided. I have been scheduled to be in two places at the same time in the recent years because of this lack of transparency. Thank you for supporting me in being organized, which is a challenge you offered to support me in when we last met face to face.

Faculty-Name

Chair: On Tue, Oct 4, 2016 at 4:57 PM

Faculty-Name,

First, the spreadsheet you are referring to does not exist. There may have been something like that before me but we have transitioned a while ago to a much bigger, complete spreadsheet of ALL the classes and ALL the faculty—this doc also contains confidential personnel info that is not ok to share with faculty at large. I think what you are referring to may have been when Dave was Chair. That has not been the case for many years. Before you start throwing around accusations of lack of transparency, which is clearly not the case here, you may just want to ask for the specific info you need to make your decision.

I do not have exact dates for TGEMBA.1 Those are provided by program chairs and I have noted in my original e-mail that GMAN712 will be mid-October. TGEMA2 classes are taught during the middle of the month in two consecutive weekends, full day f2f, and online 6–9 the Wed between. I just asked Anita (supporting staff member for all Chairs) to confirm specific dates with Guido (Program director for the Transglobal program) and she came back with Oct 14–15, 18 (online) and 21–22. The teaching days/times for our graduate programs are, as you (should) know, standard. If it is MW, it is on campus and 6–10, if it is TTH,3 it is Off-campus-location-SR and 5:30 to 9:30 for 17–18 since there is no Off-campus-location-SV cohort. Again, as you (should) know, the Off-campus-location-SV program was suspended for a year.

I do not have the cohort info; however, that is very easy to figure out. If a GMAN512 follows a GMAN509 offered in the same location in the previous quarter, they must be the same cohort.

The only other times that are not specified in my e-mail are the three back-to-back BUSAD140 MWF4 courses “in the morning,” which I was planning to expand on if you showed some interest in those options, as you don’t normally teach BUSAD140.

Had I known I would be accused of providing incomplete and partial info and lack of transparency, I would have done that at the getgo. The sections are at 8:00–9:05, 9:15–10:20, 10:30–11:35.

And to clarify your point about your recent schedule issues, the reason you were scheduled to be in two different places at the same time had nothing to do with a lack of transparency. It was due to you not looping your chair in when you decided to pick up an extra course in another department on overload in addition to your existing schedule without checking whether it would create a conflict for you or anyone else.

Yes, I have offered my support to you in your organization challenge but I can only do that if I have full and complete information and full transparency from you.

I need to put together a tentative schedule at this time so Lynn and Larisa can work out the AACSB5 ratios. This will not necessarily be your final schedule—we may need to move faculty around to reach target rations if they are not met with the current deployment. So this is a starting point and please treat it as that until it is confirmed. I believe I have provided all the answers I could to everything you requested. I would appreciate it if you could provide your choices to me by tomorrow noon.

Thanks,

Chair-Name P.

Faculty: on Wed, Oct 5, 2016 at 8:34 PM

Chair-Name,

Thank you for the information. To the best of my ability, I have tried to summarize it in the spreadsheet attached, I see it in one place rather than multiple e-mails. I am still missing the times for MGT420 and T Thu BUSAD140 classes that perhaps you can fill in to help me.

Thank you for your commitment to transparency and letting me know that the spreadsheet of all courses has private information. I only need to see the courses that need to be taught by our department, and perhaps you can take a screenshot of just the courses with location and times to help me be clear on what I am committing to. I would like to see a list of all GMAN 512, GMAN509, GMAN712, and MGT 412 courses that will be taught in 2017–2018, with locations and times.

Is the Hybrid online one large session for 2017–18 or split sessions as before? Was this the implication in the switch to it being counted as one course or was there an honorarium added instead of the extra half-course credit?

From the current choices, I can neither have a full year load with undergrad courses nor with graduate courses. It is best for students that I am not teaching until 10pm and then also trying to teach at 8:30am—so I need to either have more undergraduate courses to teach or more graduate courses to choose from.

I request that you keep in mind my intention as expressed to you when I brought you the flowers—it is to work well together. If my need for clarity and details in information comes across to you as an accusation of lack of transparency, please know that I have no accusations or fights to pick with you. I am grateful you do a difficult job, and as someone more organized and capable, with a responsible role, please educate me with patience and kindness. The harsh e-mails land like stressful blows that are devastating for me, and I am not able to cope well with them. I learn best when handled gently. I am sorry that I am incapable of working out all the implications of what I “should” know from the decisions that we agree to as faculty, even if I know the decisions.

Thanks again,

Faculty-Name

Chair: No response for several days.

Faculty: On Wed, Oct 26, 2016 at 8:27 AM

Chair-name,

I don’t seem to have a response from you to this e-mail about scheduling. I am following up to make sure it was not lost in cyberspace.

Thank you,

Faculty-name

Chair: on Wed, Oct 26, 2016 at 8:41 PM

I have had to prioritize other tasks—as you know, I have multiple responsibilities. I will be going back to scheduling shortly and will respond to your note then.

Chair-name

Chair: No response for several weeks.

In the meantime, the Dean of the school sent the following e-mail to all faculty:

Re: Your Cooperation and Support for AACSB Reaccreditation Efforts

Dean: On Thu, Dec 15, 2016 at 10:44 AM

Dear Faculty,

As you are aware of, academic year of 2017–18 is the year that AACSB will look into closely to see if we are meeting all of the ratio requirements (e.g., % of Scholarly Academics, % of Participative Faculty) in all of our academic programs (undergraduate and graduate), in all of our disciplines (e.g., accounting, marketing, finance), in all of our program locations (e.g., Campus, Off-campus-1, Off-campus-2, Hybrid), and in all terms (e.g., Fall and Spring semesters and all four quarters).

The department chairs have been working very hard with you all on the 2017–18 teaching assignments to meet these ratio goals. We have made tremendous progresses. We are almost there, except for a number of adjustments needed, which we have looked at closely today at the Administrative Council meeting.

These adjustments needed would require your cooperation and support, in terms of flexibility in your 2017–18 teaching assignments and your availability of teaching overloads in some cases. I hope that you would support their work to help the school and college to meet the accreditation requirements and achieve the AACSB reaccreditation. With your institutional spirit and collective support, we had successfully done similar adjustments when we were up for the initial accreditation a few years ago. If I could be of any help to you in your efforts to assist your chairs and the school, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Thank you in advance!

Dean

The e-mail implies that tentative schedules have been set and there are shortfalls in the coverage rations expected by the accreditation agency (AACSB). Hence the dean is requesting the faculty volunteer to teach more (overload courses are above the required number of courses faculty must teach, and are paid extra for overloads). The faculty-member is now concerned that she is left out of the basic information she needs to do her job, with courses assigned to her, which she is not informed about by her department chair. She discusses the situation with the dean, and wonders how she might get information from her chair who has a history of withholding information. The dean recommends following up again with the chair.

Faculty: On Fri, Dec 30, 2016 at 9:32 AM

Chair-Name,

Wishing you a happy new year. Hope you are enjoying a peaceful holiday season. Would you please be kind enough to share the work-in-progress schedule you may have for me? As you know, the Academy submissions are due soon, and it will help me to plan my commitments.

Thanks and regards,

Faculty-name

Chair: No response for several days.

Another conversation between the faculty member and the Dean about the situation, and the dean asks the faculty member to follow up again and copy him on the e-mail.

Faculty: On Wed, Jan 18, 2017 at 12:37 PM copying the Dean on the e-mail,

Chair-Name,

Following up on my follow up e-mail of 12/30 asking about my schedule.

Any updates for me?

Thanks,

Faculty-Name

Chair: No response for several days.

Discussion

Discussion Questions: Employment contracts specify certain roles for people in the workplace. These roles have duties and obligations that are sometimes elaborated in the job-descriptions associated with these positions, such that ­people occupying these roles are expected to fulfill. The roles of faculty and department chair have been described. The e-mail exchange between the faculty and chair are one example of a commonly occurring situation in the workplace, that of the need to delegate work and coordinate collective action with agreement on schedules. This example provides a basis for discussion on how such situations may be handled, potentially with as a role-play, so students can experience it first hand, rather than just read about it.

Despite the variety of roles we may assume at work, in family or in society, we are all people first and foremost. Only a few of our roles are permanent, mostly the ones within the family. Majority of the roles we assume are transitory, changing with our affiliations as we progress through different stages of life. Yet, these roles have a way to shape us beyond the contexts they are relevant for, and tend to dominate our identity and how we function around other people. Organizational contexts tend to be characterized by hierarchical structures designed with built-in power differences between different roles. It is not uncommon for the power differences to be such that there is tacit approval for people in higher power roles to use their power freely over those subordinate to them. If the people holding positions of power do not have good self-awareness or a clear moral or ethical code imposed to limit how they use power, there is abuse of power. This abuse of power leads to fear in people and a stripping away of their basic human dignity. Routine interactions between people in boss-subordinate roles can become a source of stress, such as in the example provided earlier.

How can organizations promote fair interactions without abuse of power and be proactive in protecting human dignity? One way that organizations can ensure this is by promoting a culture where human dignity is center stage. Every employee, regardless of their role and position in the hierarchy, explicitly agrees to preserve their own and others’ dignity.

Organizations function with employment contracts that specify roles for people with certain duties and obligations elaborated in the job descriptions associated with these positions. Perhaps, if the contracts can also include the obligation to uphold human dignity and expect everyone to learn about it, there would be less need for stressful exchanges and interventions. This role-play will be useful in training people on what dignity is and how to identify it in a common work situation between two people with differential power in an organization, working toward the same shared purpose. The following discussion questions may be one possible way to lead the learning discussion.

Questions

1. List all the information that the faculty member has been asking for?
2. What information is provided to the faculty member, and what is missing?
3. What are the expectations of the faculty member and the department chair?
4. How does each respond to the other’s expectations?
5. Analyze the e-mail exchanges between the faculty and department chair on the ten elements of human dignity in order to identify when and how the two offer each other dignity.
6. Analyze the email exchanges between the faculty and department chair on the ten elements of human dignity in order to identify when and how the two DO NOT offer each other’s dignity.
7. Tabulate specific examples of explicit communication that strips dignity, and offer alternative ways that the relevant information may be communicated between the two.
8. Analyze the e-mail exchange in its totality to identify the implicit or implied communication (apart from the explicit words exchanged in the communication, focusing instead on the tone, the message, the frequency or lack thereof, and other subtle forms of nonverbal behaviors) that adds or takes away from dignified professional communication. Identify the patterns you see and label them, and offer examples if you have experienced or observed similar patterns in your professional communications. How did you respond to these? Was that effective?
9. Based on what you have learned from this vicarious exercise, how might you have handled the situations described in earlier question differently? Suggest some options you may now have that you did not consider earlier, that is, before this lesson.
10. What, if anything, might keep you from using the new ways to respond to these common work situations? How can you mitigate that to uphold human dignity in the workplace?
11. What specific commitment can you make to implement the lessons from this chapter in your life?

Lessons Learned and Conclusions

Routine workplace activities like how a supervisor and an employee communicate about assigning work can become a stressful battleground if the people involved are not getting along. These may play out as personality conflicts or loss of respect and deteriorate into name-calling and blame-game. However, if an explicit commitment is made to preserve and uphold human dignity in the workplace, there are ways to preempt these difficult situations, before or as they arise. The universal need for human dignity is a powerful way to take people out of several dysfunctional situations. It is a way to build common ground in situations of conflict. By focusing on the shared need for upholding human dignity even in the face of differences, the parties can find their way out of the victim–victor style interactions to build better communication.

The main lesson from this role-play exercise is to make participants aware of how dignity is upheld or eroded in the workplace. Although the role-play is for a specific context, the lessons learned apply to similar situations in many other workplaces, where supervisors assign work suited to the worker’s specific expertise and communicate information. The discussion questions stimulate thoughtful reflection and promote dialog about applying the framework for dignity in the workplace. There is an opportunity to process their own experiences and create solutions that work for their specific context. The exercise raises awareness and leads each one to make a commitment to solve a common problem. Peer learning enriches the discussion with shared stories of loss of dignity experienced in their different contexts, and creative solutions generated in each participants’ own unique way. The ten-point framework for human dignity, which has proven successful in its application in the international conflict situations already, is applied to further the humanistic management agenda. ­Dignity framework is used as a way to resolve a workplace situation or avert potential conflict between a supervisor and employee. There are practical organizational interventions offered to make every employee aware of and committed to upholding human dignity.

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