Human Resource Management 12th Edition by John Ivancevich,Robert Konopaske

Exercise 11

Marina Jackson was recently promoted to the position of regional sales manager for Today's Fashion, a national chain of specialty clothing stores with 200 outlets across the country. Marina is the regional manager for the Pacific Coast, which is one of Today's Fashion's largest markets. She manages 35 outlets in California and Oregon; each of these outlets has a store manager who reports directly to Marina.
Each outlet has between three and five assistant store managers, depending on the number of specialty departments. Each assistant manager is responsible for one particular specialty department. These departments vary considerably in size and in the number of sales clerks reporting to the assistant manager. Because the chain's success lies in being receptive to local customers' tastes and buying habits, each store has a different collection of merchandise, and several different combinations of departments can be found in Marina's region. The departments include casual wear, formal wear, shoes, cosmetics, and jewelry.
Prior to being appointed to the regional sales manager position, Marina had been both a store manager and an assistant manager in a casual-wear department. While she was an assistant manager, Marina had often thought that she was responsible for many aspects of store management that other assistant managers were not held responsible for. In addition, she never really felt comfortable that her store manager had clearly defined her areas of responsibility. Thus, despite the chain's success, Marina felt that there was considerable room for improvement in how Today's Fashion was managed. As a result, one of the first things Marina did after being appointed to the regional sales position was to initiate a job analysis for the job of assistant store manager.
Marina had earned a BBA degree with a marketing emphasis from the University of California at Los Angeles. Although she had no formal training in job analysis, she was confident that she could construct an accurate and useful job description and specification for the assistant manager job, primarily because of her personal experience with that position. However, rather than simply writing from her own experience, Marina interviewed three current assistant store managers from the outlet closest to her regional office in Sacramento. On the basis of these interviews and her own experience, Marina constructed the job description and job specification shown in Exhibit 6A-1. She hopes that these documents will form the basis of a new selection program that she wants to implement for

her region. She believes that the best way to improve store management is to hire assistant store managers who are qualified to perform successfully.
Critically evaluate the job analysis that Marina conducted for the position of assistant store manager. Has she used appropriate methods What are the strengths and weaknesses of her efforts