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🎙 RD Exam Ready Podcast
Your show to becoming a Registered Dietitian—simplified and supported.
Welcome to the RD Exam Ready Podcast, where future Registered Dietitian Nutritionists (RDNs) get the tools, insights, and encouragement they need to pass the CDR Exam with confidence. Hosted by Zak Kaesberg, founder of RD Exam Ready and the Diet NPO Podcast, this show breaks down challenging exam topics, explores modern study techniques, and highlights the best resources to ensure you're truly exam-ready.
Hello, RDs and RDs to be. Welcome to the RD exam ready podcast. I'm Zach Caseberg, your tutor, coach, and guide along the path of passing the RD exam. So happy you're here to listen in today and watch Because if you are, it means that you maybe wanna learn more about passing the RD exam, and I promise you're in the right place. If you sit me down on any given day and say, Zach, today you're gonna study one of the four domains of the exam, your choice, I would have to think about that.
Zak:But if you're like me, if I had the choice, I'm gonna pick probably domains one and two to study. And that's because I love science. My brain is attracted to it. It gravitates to it, and I understand it a lot better than management and food service. But, unfortunately, the whole exam is not just consisting of domains one and two.
Zak:We also have domain three, which is management, and domain four, which is food service production and food service systems. Now with management, which will be our topic today, you'll remember that there is five functions of management, and I'd like you to say them with me. Number one is planning, followed by organizing, staffing, directing, and controlling. When you're doing step four of directing, you're acting as a director. That's making sure everyone shows up that day.
Zak:They clock in. They know what their tasks are. They start doing them, complete them, and then they end their day by clocking out. Directing is doing here, folks. Now behind that doing is theory in leadership and theory in management.
Zak:What these theories provide and what they do is they give a framework to train a manager so they have the skills to know how to act in a situation. Because employees can be difficult to manage. Most people really don't love their job. I certainly know I don't. So we need to find ways to keep people motivated, keep them showing up, and doing their job effectively.
Zak:We're gonna discuss each of these management and leadership theories together. We're gonna discuss the root of it, review some situations in which the theory can be used, and just know what we need for exam day. For theory number one, best known is the Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It's the basic point that people are motivated by their desire to satisfy specific needs, which are arranged in order from the most basic needs at the bottom to the highest self actualization needs at the top. Let's start from the bottom and work our way up to the top.
Zak:We start with physiological needs. And when you think physiological, I want you to think of the body because these are basic needs, like that of water, food, clothing, and shelter. These needs must be met by people first before they can expand to any other needs. And this should make sense to you. Right?
Zak:If you don't have food, you can't focus on relationships, your creativity, your other needs if you just don't have your needs met. And as a manager, you're ensuring employees have this. The way you do that is giving them money. Benefits. Good working conditions are all ways to satisfy those most basic needs.
Zak:Next would be your safety needs. Once you've had your physiological needs met, you can now focus on protection. So this will be freedom from fear, security in your job, and protection from danger in the workplace. To satisfy these needs, you're giving employees insurance, retirement plans, job security, and safe working conditions, as well as a competent and fair leader to be in charge of them. Next, we would elevate to a social needs.
Zak:Right? Social needs are gonna consist of lovingness, belongingness, affiliation, and acceptance is what we're gonna see here too. By providing your employees with friendly associates, workplace activities, parties, and potlucks, You can do this and provide some of your employees with that social need that they may be craving. Alright. We're doing great here, everyone.
Zak:Now we're moving up the pyramid. We're gonna keep going here as we go through. Once those employees have had those kind of esteem or those social needs kind of met here. Back that up. Okay, good.
Zak:We talked through esteem needs, status. Okay. Okay, let me go back just a little bit and make sure I talked about this, everyone. So we satisfied those social needs by potlucks, parties, and activities. Maslow's fourth step is gonna be the esteem needs.
Zak:Okay? So your self esteem. We're getting higher in the pyramid here, like I said. And esteem is about achievement and status recognition. This is satisfied by employees providing a title or getting some more responsibility in the job.
Zak:When they get praise, they get rewards or recognition of their accomplishments, they're always being kind of having these esteem needs satisfied. The final step of Maslow's is self actualization needs. This is based on realizing one's potential growth using creative talents. Once all other needs have been met, people kind of reach a peak and they feel like most if not all their needs are met except the only one thing is to expand their creativity. You can challenge employees.
Zak:You can challenge them to use their creativity. Give them opportunities like personal growth or continuing education or advancing them in the job. These are all ways to satisfy those self actualization needs. Theory two is called the existence relatedness growth theory, ERG. What this theory proposed was a more simplistic model of human needs that influence their work behavior.
Zak:And according to this theory, needs can be grouped into three basic needs. Existence, relatedness, and growth. Existence is your basic needs to exist, like water, shelter, and safety. Again, this isn't meant to be a hierarchy. It's just to give you different categories here.
Zak:Relatedness is our second one. And if I say the word relatedness or if you see it on the exam, what does your brain think of in that case? Well, relatedness should make you think of, okay, I'm thinking of social aspects. I'm thinking of interpersonal aspects here. So we know that that's gonna fit well with relatedness.
Zak:And thirdly is growth. This is kinda getting down similar to what Maslow was saying, where they feel like they're growing, they're completing productive, meaningful tasks in the workplace. The theory did introduce that employees who are not having their highest level of growth met will become frustrated and would end up regressing to lower levels. So that's to say, if an employee is not having their growth needs met, then they will regress to being more attracted towards their relatedness or existence needs in that case. Theory number three, achievement power affiliation theory.
Zak:McLean is introducing our third theory today. I actually find this one to be really simple because McLean states that employees have three needs, a need to achieve, a need for power, and a need for affiliation. Understand what each of these comprises, though. Achievement is just the needs or want to do something better, more efficiently, and these employees tend to have the following traits. They respond to goals well.
Zak:They seek a challenge. They want feedback on performance and take personal responsibility, and they're willing to do the hard work. It's because they want to achieve. People with these achievement motives, they tend to gravitate towards managerial and sales positions because in these roles, they're able to manage themselves pretty easily and have more control over their drive for achievement. They are also task oriented and they work to their capacity and also expect others to do the same.
Zak:That being said, we know if we have high expectations for others, or we place that on others, that sometimes they tend to have poor human skills is what we see. Because if you're having such high expectations for others all the time, you kinda can come off rude and have poor human skills. Secondly is power motive. These individuals just want power to influence others. They tend to like competition, and they want to acquire and exercise power.
Zak:They're willing to be confrontational because they're willing to use their power. If you're using the power motive to help the company and improve your organization, then that's a positive use of this power motive. But if you're using it just to plains place strain on your coworkers to satisfy a personal need to dominate others, then it can be considered a negative. It needs to be kind of considered there too. Thirdly, affiliation.
Zak:There's that word again. Affiliation should make you think of interpersonal connections relatedness with others. Those with others with, like, a high affiliation need, they like to connect together. Okay? With people that like affiliation, they want to seek and establish relationships, and they want to do social activities.
Zak:They want to join groups, join clubs. And when working with an employee like this, you have to be nice to them because they are going to respond much better with warmth and support than they will with negativity. And most people should have a degree of each of these as a manager. And as a manager, you should be able to recognize what your employees want in their workplace, and adjust in a way. Our next theory will be Herzberg's Two Factor Model.
Zak:Herzberg developed this theory of work motivation with the focus of rewards, of outcomes, of job performance. Now if you work, you can imagine there's a few outcomes that you get. You get money. You get praise. You get benefits.
Zak:What Hirsberg categorized these into, first, motivating factors, and secondly, maintenance factors. Motivators and maintenance factors. We're gonna start with maintenance factors first for clarity. Maintenance factors are things that are nice to have in the job. Don't get me wrong, but they don't make you love the job.
Zak:And this is things like pay and salary, supervision, job security, working conditions, policies, relationships on the jobs. These are all things that are nice to haves, but they don't make me love the job more. Motivators are things that make you love the job. And that's stuff like achievement, responsibility, advancement, growth potential, or recognition. This may be confusing, but follow me here.
Zak:Think of the worst job you've ever done. For me, it was detasseling. If you don't know what that is, look it up. You walk rows of corn all day, and what you do is you pull out these tassels of corn. It's hot.
Zak:It's wet. There are spiders. And I got paid like a solid $12.50 an hour when I was a kid doing it. Great. Right?
Zak:Now guess what? If you decided to pay me $25 an hour to do that job, that's nice. But it doesn't make me like the tasseling and make it make me any more passionate about it. If I was promoted, if I was recognized for good work or given growth potential, I would have been more motivated to do the work certainly. While employees do like having those maintenance factors that we talked about like pay, like salary, like a four zero one k, What you need to remember for exam day is it's not going to make them motivated to do their job better or more.
Zak:Our fifth theory is called the expectancy theory. What is with the Expectancy Theory? What it does is it attempts to explain the behavior in terms of individual goals, choices, or expectations. According to the theory, people are motivated to work if they believe their efforts will be rewarded and if they value the rewards being offered. So let's think of a teacher's pet in school.
Zak:The teacher's pet sucks up to the teacher. They treat them nicely. They perform well on exams. And because they feel they do all these things, they think that they're going to be rewarded with praise and good grades. The teacher's pet wants the reward of praise and good grades, But they have to want and value that reward, don't they?
Zak:A different situation or a different student may not care at all about praise or good grades. So what benefit is it to them to be the teacher's pet if they have no value of the rewards that are even offered? What expectancy theory teaches managers is that all employees have different motivations and goals. And by knowing what your employee perceives as valuable, you can motivate them to work better. Theory six is gonna be reinforcement theory.
Zak:Developed by the great behaviorist, B. F. Skinner, reinforcement theory is thought that previous experiences tell us that certain behaviors will happen. For instance, what we're gonna give a little scenario here. A food service employee has learned from previous experiences that if they show up with ripped jeans and a dirty uniform, that someone's going to say something and they'll be sent home.
Zak:Okay? They learned this in school. They learned this in their first job. If they show up without their uniform, people give them hell about it, or they get sent home. Right?
Zak:So now this person has learned this through this theory, and now they show up to work every day with a clean uniform with no holes in it. It is going to be repeated because it is being reinforced. And that reinforcement doesn't always have to be positive to lead you toward positive outcomes. In my example, the employee had a negative experience where people gave them a lot of grief about not wearing the right uniform and told them to go home. So they had a negative experience, but what that taught them was to engage in certain behaviors associated with a positive outcome, like showing up to work with the correct uniform.
Zak:Essentially, this theory is just the simple behaviors of what humans learn, but it's applying it to that of the workplace, of why employees are motivated. It's the same concept of why humans are motivated by what they want. Right? Theory seven will be MacGregor's theory x and y. We'll we just reviewed a little bit of our management theories, but there's also a few leadership theories we need to know.
Zak:I don't think of them as being completely different. I don't. Because much of what we think of management and motivation has to do with how we lead others. What do we want you to different do I need you to differentiate between leadership and management theories? No.
Zak:But it is good just to know an example. McGregor's theory x and y talks about two types of managers and leaders. Theory x is the negative, and theory y is the positive. What theory x and y is focused on is that managers perceive their employees and how they feel about work in different ways. So we want to apply some different examples to help us.
Zak:Okay? There's the thought that you need to employees primarily through fear, close surveillance, and in order to get those objectives. And that's theory X here. So theory X is that negative one, and it's always believing that you have to force employees to work because they hate work. They have to be forced to work in any way possible.
Zak:As you can imagine, theory x is probably not currently the best way to approach working with employees. Conversely, theory y focuses on leadership by allowing employees to experience personal satisfaction and be self directed. It's the thought the employees love work, they love what they do, and they are more happy and satisfied when they are directed on their own to do it. Theory X tends to be much more autocratic, whereas theory Y is much more participative. I do want to add too about theory Z, or OICI as it is known.
Zak:In this, employees are seen as the greatest asset, and there is mutual loyalty between the employee and the employer themself. Everyone has to be involved in the decision making in an OIC setting, and this is widely used in Japan and where it's known the most. The final one I'm gonna talk through here is one you might not be familiar with. It's called Argyris Argyris immaturity maturity theory. K?
Zak:Not one that I myself am totally familiar with. A r g y r I. Check that out. It's one that was reviewed in the text. So I said, hey.
Zak:I'm gonna talk about it here briefly. According to this theory, if you have an immature employee, let's say a new 19 year old on the job, and if you give them an immature job like cleaning dishes, then you should not be surprised when that immature employee seems passive or uninterested in doing their job. The theory kind of challenges management to provide a work climate where employees have a chance to grow and mature while working for success of the organization. In food service, this is emphasized because a lot of the tasks that are done are meaningless and very simple. Dishwashing, you know, polishing silverware, cleaning plates, cooking steaks.
Zak:It is all pretty boring and simple. So you need to find ways to enrich employees to keep them mature and keep them interested in some way, or else they will regress to more immature levels. Now that we've gone through all of our different management leadership theories, it's time, RDDB, to apply this to your practice questions. Number one. A manager is utilizing Maslow's hierarchy of needs to improve their employee's esteem needs.
Zak:Which of the following would best fit to meet the employee's esteem needs? Okay. Little wordy. A manager is utilizing Maslow's to improve the employee's esteem needs. Which of the following would best fit to meet the employee's esteem needs?
Zak:K. A, b, c, or d. I'm gonna use process of elimination to see what my best answer is. For a, Increased money and benefits. B.
Zak:Organized employee parties. C. Increased responsibility and praise for accomplishments. Or D. A safe working environment.
Zak:Okay. Let's see one of these best fits with the esteem needs. For a, increased money and benefits. This doesn't feel like it meets much of the esteem needs in this case. Maybe more of like the security and safety needs, some of the more basic needs, but not this one.
Zak:Organized employee parties. This helps out a lot, I would say, with kind of that connection piece, that interpersonal piece that we see, the relatedness that we want, but I don't think it focuses on the employee's self esteem. And I would rule out A and B because of that. C, increased responsibility and praise for accomplishments. I think this is a good fit for esteem needs, and I'm gonna place a check mark by it.
Zak:Or d, a safe working environment. A safe working environment, that's gonna be much more focused on their safety needs, and I don't think that'll be a good fit. So if I was between these four, I would choose c, increased responsibility and praise for accomplishments would be the best way for the manager to satisfy their employee's esteem needs. Hope you got that one down. Make sure you use that POE or process of elimination just to help you kinda organize yourself during a question.
Zak:Excuse me. The achievement power affiliation theory. This is number two. The achievement power affiliation theory states, a, employee motivation can be split into maintenance and motivating factors. B, employees are motivated based on what they expect to get as a reward.
Zak:C, employees hate work and must be punished into doing work. Or d, employees are motivated by three needs and gravitate toward one of these three needs based on learned, socially acquired interactions. Okay. So which one fits with achievement power affiliation? For a, employee motivation can be split into maintenance and motivating factors.
Zak:To me, this felt like this was Herzberg's, his two factor model there, and I don't think it's achievement power affiliation. I'm gonna roll that one out first. For b, employees are motivated based on what they expect to get as a reward. I feel like this was more of like an expectancy theory type thing. It just doesn't feel like a good fit for achievement, power, affiliation.
Zak:I'm gonna rule out B as well. C. Employees hate work and must be punished into doing work. That sounds a lot like theory x to me, so I'm not thinking that's a good answer either. I would rule that one out, but let's check D here.
Zak:Employees are motivated by three needs and gravitate towards one of these three needs based on learned and socially acquired interactions. Would this be the best fit for achievement power affiliation theory? I would say yes. So employees are motivated by these three needs and gravitate towards one of these three needs based on learned socially acquired interactions. Very good there already to be.
Zak:Just one more question for our day here. According to Hirsberg's two factor model, which of the following is a maintenance factor? A, employee of the month posting, b, work sponsored education programs, C, salary. Or D, recognition of great performance. According to Hirsberg's two factor model, which of the following is a maintenance factor?
Zak:Which is one of those not bad ones, but just ones, you know? For a, employee of the month posting, I don't think this would be a maintenance factor. To me this actually seems like a motivator, and to some of us that might seem like a nightmare, But it actually can be a motivator for recognition of good work done. For b, work sponsored education programs? I'm gonna put a question mark by this one for right now.
Zak:I'm not quite sure about it. C, salary. Salary, I think, would be a great fit for maintenance factors, because we talked about things like pay, four zero one ks, benefits. They're all just kinda, they're nice to have, but they don't give a lot of motivation. I think C is a good fit.
Zak:And then d, recognition of great performance. Well, this is a great thing to do, but I don't think it fits well for a maintenance factor. I actually think it's a motivator here, folks. So if I'm stuck between salary or work sponsored education program, I feel much better about salary, and that is gonna be my best fit for number three, for Herzberg's two factor model, and our maintenance factors. That wraps up today's lesson here, r d s t b.
Zak:I hope you listened. You learned. You enjoyed joining us and kind of learning a little bit as we went along. Remember that passing this exam is a journey. We all need assistance along the way.
Zak:And do yourself, do me a favor. Hit the subscribe button if you haven't, tell other studying students about the show, listen together, rate, review, comment, and just help spread the word. And as always, happy studying RD2B.