¶ … President Kobayashi might have appointed a task force to consider fringe benefits rather than assigning this task to the human resources department. A multi-departmental task force will have more accurate and meaningful localized knowledge that it can bring to bear in addressing this situation, and the empowerment given to the task force will help to increase the acceptance of the proposed changes to benefits given the cuts that will be necessary due to budget constraints. There is some trade-off in cost savings and decision management by decentralizing the task, but the rewards are substantial. Though the task force has been instructed to take the budget constraints of the university into consideration, it would be naive of President Kobayashi to assume that everyone in the task force would keep this priority entirely in mind during the...

Attention to the budget issues could be incentivized by establishing definite goals in cuts to expenditures for fringe benefits and by tying compensation for task force participation to the ability to meet these goals. Ensuring that the importance of the budget constraints and the need to make cuts in order to keep employees and operations at current levels is made clear to the task force members will also help in this regard.
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As the majority of the employees of the university work in the hospital, assigning the hospital administrator to chair the task force makes sense because this is the individual with the most decision management and knowledge capabilities when it comes to determining what benefits will be needed and what can be dispensed with as well as what the various costs…