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Conflict Resolution

When you work at a bar, conflict can come from many different sources. While most of these are alcohol and patron related, some conflicts can arise from the way the bar is run in the first place. Last year the bar was treated to a surprise health inspection and if you have ever stepped foot inside of KAMS you would know that we did not do that well. KAMS prides itself as being the oldest bar on campus and often gives alumni that wave of nostalgia when they walk in due to the lack of major renovations made over the years. Unfortunately, nostalgia isn’t the only thing that hits them when they walk in; they’re also greeted by the classic KAMS smell of molded alcohol. Needless to say, the lack of renovations and the lackadaisical way that cleans were held before the health inspection caused us to fail horribly. This put us on thin ice with the health inspector, which prompted our owner to hold a two-hour meeting with completely new cleaning guidelines and a new checklist
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Team Production with Gift Exchange

The articles we were asked to read for this blog post all had a similar theme to some of the social aspects to economic transaction. At my current job, we have a form of team production with gift exchange in the way that we give up and pick up shifts. When I first got hired at the bar I started as a doorman, which meant I cleaned up the bar, and ensure nothing too crazy happened. Every week we fill out a Google sheet with the shifts we want and don’t want to work, and if you forget to fill them out you could end up working a shift you don’t want to or not work a shift at all. When it comes to getting shifts covered there is a sense of altruism that is described from the third article. Whenever someone tries to get a shift covered due to a family emergency or something important that is related to school, another employee will usually step up right away to take the shift. While sometimes those motives aren’t always altruistic and could be attributed to a lack of shifts or money, wh
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Risk

Throughout my college career, there were several decisions I made to manage my life track and to plan for my future as an adult. Even before setting foot on this campus, I made the all-important decision of attending this university over the other three I had been admitted to. While the University of Illinois was not the most prestigious university I was accepted to, I decided to attend due to the proximity from my house in the suburbs of Chicago and the scholarship I received which significantly reduced my cost of attendance. I made the decision because of the looming debt that I would have accumulated going to a more expensive school and since I was in charge of paying for my own education, I hade to be conscious of the bills I would be paying after college. My brother, who graduated from Elmhurst College in 2004, stressed to me the importance of limiting the amount of student loans that I took out due to the adjustable interest rates and the likelihood that I would be deferring my
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Team organization

When I saw this prompt for team organization and success, there was one specific team that I was a part of that came immediately to mind. In high school, I was part of a choir that achieved an immense amount of success due to the leadership and organization of our directors. As described by Bolman and Deal in chapter 5 of the textbook, our choir ran under dual authority, although selection was not democratic and our choir director had been tenured at our high school for 25 years. Our main choir director, Mrs. Tobison, had the final word on all matters but we also had an assistant director that worked under Mrs Tobison and influenced the decisions the choir made. Mrs. Tobison handled the chamber choir, which was also our competition choir, and the select ensemble women’s choir, while Mrs Spurling handled the freshmen and sophomore choir and the all girl freshmen choir. In terms of logistics, Mrs. Tobison arranged all of our concerts, picked our music, ran rehearsals, and acted as t
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Opportunism

In my current line of work, opportunism has presented itself more in the past year than in any other job or experience I've had in my life. At the bar I work at we have a tip out system that is based on highest sales made, this was pushed by our owner to increase total sales of the bar and to encourage bartenders to bring their friends out to the bar. Now there are two distinct ways that I have seen opportunism present in the workplace. The first one would be serving someone who is clearly ordering for an underage patron. While technically legal since the purchasing party is 21 and with clear incentive to take the sale to receive the extra sales, this opportunity presents itself a staggering amount on most nights and for 95% of cases, I do not serve them. Although the chance of getting caught is not exceedingly common, the risk of getting fired and fined by the Champaign police department are enough deterrents for me to avoid the situation completely. The other case of opportunism
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Organization and Transaction Costs

Throughout my high school and college career, I have found myself part of many different organizations that operate quite differently from each other. The main two that come to mind are the retail store I worked at in high school and the campus bar that I work at currently. The retail store that I worked at was different from the traditional retail store due to the manner in which they went about purchasing inventory. I worked for TJ Maxx, which prides itself in providing brand name fashion for a fraction of the price.  I was only a cashier/sales associate, however, I still got a very good look at the organization of the store due to my extended time of employment. There were three managers: the store manager, the hiring manager, and the floor manager. Underneath them were the co-ordinators which served as a middle link in rank between the starting associate and the manager. The scheduling was all handled by management and you would have up to three weeks of scheduling at a time. Inv
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