MGT 341 - Final Paper (1)

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University of Rhode Island *

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Apr 3, 2024

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Kyle Eliasen, Dominic Russo, Lindsey Arduini, Matt Villani, Jake Stadulis Professor Boyd MGT341 12/8/23 URI Housing and Residential Life (HRL) The University of Rhode Island's Housing and Residential Life oversees around 5,500 students across the 24 undergraduate resident halls, 3 undergraduate apartment buildings, and 1 graduate apartment building. Their mission states to, “Provide access to quality and affordable campus housing, which supports the educational and developmental needs of our students as well as the academic goals of the University (URI Housing). Deliver safe, clean, and well maintained accommodations. Housing strives to build communities that maintain a healthy balance of personal rights and responsibilities, promote respect for diversity and human dignity, and instill pride in the University of Rhode Island.” Although Housing and Residential Life strives for this mission there are many recurring issues within the organization. We believe this to be related to overall job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and stressors. We chose to study job performance amongst other organizational behavior topics within the organization. We felt as if there are many issues, specifically relating to lack of communication between staff and students. URI’s Housing and Residential Life promotes quality housing that is well maintained. Yet many students who live on campus have struggled with housing. This includes health and safety issues as well as an overall difficulty of securing housing. By researching more about Housing and Residential Life we can discover the deeper issues within the organization as a whole. Analysis

The current state of dorm life at the University of Rhode Island unveils a concerning narrative of unsatisfactory living conditions for students. Our exploration into this problem was initiated through a series of interviews with current students, revealing distressing instances such as a bed bug infestation in Adams Hall. This incident forced affected students to temporarily relocate while their living space underwent disinfection, an example of the unsanitary conditions that some dormitory residents endure. Further insights into the suboptimal living environment were blatant during our interviews. Pointing to additional issues like mold, dust-filled filtration systems, and a shortage of clean bathrooms and toiletries. These uncovered the inadequacy of the dormitory conditions, posing a significant challenge to the well-being and satisfaction of students. To further our analysis, we used relevant OB concepts to better understand the dynamics at play within University Housing and Residential Life. One pivotal concept is job satisfaction, which we suspect is minimal amongst employees due to challenges such as poor efficiency in problem-solving. This aligns with the dissatisfaction reported by students, suggesting a potential connection between staff dissatisfaction and the persisting issues within dormitories. In a survey taken, janitors were one of the least satisfied professions within the United States posting a 2.2 / 5 stars average satisfaction rating. College janitors, having to deal with at times frustrating young adults and absurd cleaning projects, satisfactions are very low (Career Explorer). Organizational commitment is another crucial aspect we explored. It is apparent that most of the staff displays normative or continuance commitment. The feeling of “ought to stay” or perhaps do not think they will find something better (Mind Tools). We asked one of our friends who is familiar with a janitor in one of the dormitories if he would be willing to ask the employee a couple of questions. He gladly accepted and one answer to the question “do you find

that you enjoy doing your job?” was very telling. The response was “I am just doing it for the paycheck… obviously it is not my dream job, but I do not hate it, there are some upsides”. It comes to show that there is a significant lack of role importance and organizational commitment. University of Rhode Island janitors on average are paid between $35,000 and $40,000 (GovSalaries). Well underpaid for the average worker in today's economy. Lastly, stressors within the organization and the presence of a cohesive and collaborative environment are additional dimensions we investigated. One example we could all come up with is wait times. Freshman year living in dorms, all group members had similar experiences in poor response time. One that stood out was getting locked out after using the communal shower and having to wait over thirty minutes in a towel to get let back in. With no roommate or RA present, at times staff have to travel large distances on campus to let students back in their dorms. In speaking to an on-call RA, he illuminated some of the troubles he and his coworkers endure everyday. Factoring in the multitude of students that get locked out of their room consistently, distances they have to travel, coordination with the hallway RAs and supervisors, along with other daily obligations. With only so many staff on call, the stress and obligations endured are extreme stressors, causing high turnover rates in faculty. Recommendations The current unsanitary and hazardous dorm conditions require implementation of more rigorous sanitation standards. This will be enforced through stricter policies and accountability measures. The best practices will come through daily cleaning of all housing facilities, with the addition of deeper monthly sanitizations to prevent infestations and mold. To tackle this issue we believe protocols allowing students to anonymously report unsanitary or dangerous issues for investigation would assist in identifying problem areas more quickly. This would allow the

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higher positions within URI housing to assess how well the custodians are doing. Once they find areas of weakness they know where to attack and build up the basics of sanitary living. Implementing regular cleaning, straightforward student reporting, and policy-based accountability around sanitation would help improve URI’s unsafe dorms. In addition to the unsanitary dorm situations, the delays students deal with for basic assistance, and lockout responses or repairs call for staffing needs. We recommend around-the- clock on-call staff should be expanded to prevent overreliance on just one or two responders. Also, categorizing the service calls by urgency and time sensitivity would allow higher priority issues like locked out students to jump ahead of lower risk administrative tasks. The use of technology within service requests like tracking and preemptive sensors detecting pipe leaks or mold risks would allow earlier intervention also. These would overall allow urgent issues to take precedent, and would help URI address unacceptable delays students currently endure. Finally, the lack of communication between the students and staff adds to persisting housing problems going unresolved. We recommend establishing monthly forums for students and housing services staff to discuss concerns transparently, brainstorm solutions collaboratively, and build trust through dialogue. This would allow full transparency between everyone and issues would be present to the custodians as soon as they became a problem. Most importantly, both students and staff should be educated that they are partners sharing responsibility for making campus housing meet community standards. Prioritizing transparency, cooperation and shared expectations through better communication channels. This would help remedy URI’s hazardous, unresponsive status quo in housing. Team Process & Communication Reflection

Throughout this project our team has made exceptional progress in both task and team work processes. Going back to the day our team was put together we believe that our team leader selected a very diversified group that had a promising future of working well together. Us being a group of five we had a variety of personality traits within our group including conscientious, agreeableness, extroversion, and emotional stability. This gave us a very well balanced team as many of these personality traits when working together can produce very effective results. Regarding Tuckman's stages of team development after the forming stage we believe our group quickly accelerated past the storming stage and right into the norming stage. The reason being our group was able to easily connect with each other which allowed us to work through the stages of development faster. The performing stage definitely came out the most during the week of our proposal being due because of the fact that it was the first big group assignment we had worked on (Tuckman). Besides this project it was the most we had communicated and worked together all semester. With our group still being in the performing stage of team development, we will shortly be experiencing the adjourning stage after our presentation as our work as a team will come to an end. When it actually got to the point where we were working with each other almost every week of the semester our team process started to become even more efficient. As all those activities and interactions we had together helped create cohesion and effectiveness within our team. In addition, it helped a great amount with coordination loss as we saw much less of it as we started to communicate much more efficiently with each other. Which played a huge factor in taskwork processes because this allowed us to excel as a team when it came down to accomplishing tasks and reaching our end goal.

Sources - “Career Explorer - Are Janitors Happy?” CareerExplorer , CareerExplorer, 11 July 2023, www.careerexplorer.com/careers/janitor/satisfaction/. - “Mind Tools - The Three Component Model of Commitment.” MindTools , www.mindtools.com/a64ukmv/the-three-component-model-of-commitment. Accessed 7 Dec. 2023. - “U R I.” GovSalaries , govsalaries.com/salaries/RI/u-r-i/j/sr-janitor?page=3. Accessed 7 Dec. 2023. - “URI Housing - Mission and Vision.” Housing and Residential Life , web.uri.edu/housing/about-us/mission-and-vision/#:~:text=Provide%20access%20to %20quality%20and,academic%20goals%20of%20the%20University. Accessed 7 Dec. 2023. - “Tuckman - Collaborative on-Line Research and Learning.” Tuckman’s Stages of Group Development - WCU of PA - Tuckmanwww.wcupa.edu/coral/tuckmanStagesGroupDelvelopment.aspx#:~:text=These %20stages%20are%20commonly%20known,more%20collaborative%20or%20shared %20leadership. Accessed 7 Dec. 2023.

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MGT 341 - Final Paper (1)

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