Riassunto del libro ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR, Sintesi del corso di Comunicazione Professionale

Scarica Riassunto del libro ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Comunicazione Professionale solo su Docsity! 1 ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR Chapter 1 - WHAT IS ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR THE NATURE AND SCOPE OF OB DEFINING OB Organizational behavior is concerned with the study of people within an organizational setting. It involves the understanding, prediction and control of human behavior. This definition is strictly managerial. The words prediction and control emphasize the performance dimension, while the second seems to highlight the subjective experience of organizational actors on their own terms as a worthwhile area for study. Organizational behavior concerns the first and foremost as practices of organizing and meaning- making, involving thinking, feeling and acting that are not so dissimilar to everyday life. This identifies the core elements of the subject while allowing readers to take insights and evidence from the OB knowledge bank and to use these in a variety of contexts and from eclectic perspectives. WHICH SUBJECT DISCIPLINES MAKE UP OB? OB is a composite subject which draws on individual subject disciplines such as psychology, sociology and anthropology. There are also links to other social sciences, such as economies and political science. WHICH SUBJECT DISCIPLINES MAKE UP OB? OB is unique in its focus on applying diverse insights to create better understanding and management of human behavior in organizations. Among the special characteristics of OB are its: • Applied focus: to help and organizations achieve high performance levels and to help ensure that all members of organizations achieve satisfaction from their tasks contributions and work experiences. • Contingency orientation: behavior may vary systematically depending on the circumstances and the people involved. HOW CAN WE STUDY PEOPLE AT WORK? OB is highly relevant to all of us and is an accessible subject in that we have our own preformed views on such questions as how workers can be effectively motivated or how to assess other people’s personalities. The 3 key characteristics of positivism OB research and study are the controlled and systematic process of data collection, careful testing of the proposed explanations and acceptance only of explanation that can be scientifically verified. THE RELEVANCE OF OB It has been argued that increasingly all types of organization have come to view workers as resources whose outputs add value. OB is not a static discipline. Managers are constantly seeking new insights and ideas to improve their effectiveness. OB should help managers both deal with and learn from their workplace experiences. Managers who understand what they find and to take the required action. Effective managers need to understand the people they rely on for the performance of their unit. Predicting behavior is difficult as each person, team / group and organization is complex and unique. 2 THE PERFORMANCE EQUATION We can reduce the above-mentioned complexity by adhering to an underlying principle, namely that the performance of an individual, team, group and organization is always a function of: capacity to work, willingness to work and opportunity to work. This concept can be summarized by the performance equation. It views the performance as a combination of personal and / or group attributes, the effort people put in at work and the organizational support they receive. This equation can be applied to the three different units of analysis that form the structure of this book: individual, group / team and organization. The multiplication signs indicate that all three factors must be present for high performance to be achieved. Each factor should be maximized for each of the three units of analysis in work settings if the maximum level of accomplishment is to be realized. Every manager should be capable of understanding how these 3 factors, acting either alone or in combination, affect performance. PERFORMANCE AND EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE For practitioners, the performance equation raises the question of whether performance is predictable. It is suggested that cognitive ability, or intelligence, is a reasonable predictor of job performance. Many human resource managers would argue that additional testing is required to ensure a good fit capability and expected performance. Over the past 3 decades the concept of emotional intelligence is a key aspect of managing people effectively and it is a form of social intelligence that allows us to monitor and shape our emotions and those of others. The emotional competence is a learned capability, based on emotional intelligence, which is associated with outstanding work performance. When we seek to apply EI to our own situation, practical guidance is available including a self- assessment instrument, which aims to measure traits and abilities related to social knowledge. The emotional quotient inventory is a measure of psychological well-being and adaptation and can be related to performance. THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING POSITIVE Emotional intelligence has been located within an emerging school of positive organizational behavior. The concept of EI enables us to recognize emotions of all kinds and to channel these to positive effect. Psychology should be used to highlight positive events and improve people’s well- being rather than focus on negative or pathological topics and examples. Positive OB should involve a balance perspective which also looks at weakness and failure, and their links with success via learning. ORGANIZING FOR EFFECTIVE PERFORMANCE The division of labor is the process of breaking the work to be done into specialized tasks that individuals or groups can perform: it is a way of organizing the efforts of many people to the best advantage of that employing organization and ideally the workers themselves. The aim is to help managers to mobilize the work of many people in order to achieve that organization’s purpose. Synergy is the creation of a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. It occurs when people work well together while using available resources to pursue a common purpose. SUSTAINING QUALITY OF WORK-LIFE Quality of work-life refers to the overall quality of human experience in the workplace. It expresses a special way of thinking about people, their work and the organization in which their careers are fulfilled. 5 FUNCTIONS OF CULTURE External adaptation involves reaching goals and dealing with parties external to the organization. the issues involve assessing the tasks to be accomplished, the methods used to achieve the goals and the ways of coping with success and failure. Internal integration is the creation of a collective identity and the means of matching methods of working and living together. Chapter 2 – PERCEPTION, PERSONALITY AND VALUES INTRODUCTION Perception is the process through which people receive, organize and interpret info from their environment. Personality is the overall profile or combination of traits that characterize the unique nature of a person. Values are global beliefs that guide actions and judgments across a variety of situations. An attitude is a predisposition to respond in a positive or negative way to someone or something in your environment. A stereotype is a view of an individual person or group that is derived from assumed wider characteristics. INDIVIDUAL ATTRIBUTES AND THE PERFORMANCE EQUATION INDIVIDUAL ATTRIBUTES Several broad categories of attributes create individual differences that are important. These include demographic or biographic characteristics, competency characteristics, values. Individual attributes should ideally match task requirements to facilitate job performance. WORK EFFORT To achieve high levels of performance, even people with the right individual attributes must have the willingness to perform, that is they must display adequate work effort. Different individuals display different levels of willingness to perform. Motivation to work refers to the forces within an individual that account for the level, direction and persistence of effort expended on work. Level of effort refers to the amount of energy that is put forth by the individual. Direction refers to an individual’s choice when presented with a number of alternatives. 6 Persistence refers to the length of time a person is willing to persevere with a given action. ORGANIZATIONAL SUPPORT Even people whose individual characteristics satisfy job requirements and who are highly motivated to exert effort may not be good performers in reality because they don’t receive adequate support in the workplace (situational constraints). UNDERSTANDING PERCEPTION AND ITS IMPLICATIONS The concept of perception relates to the process by which people select, organize, interpret, retrieve and respond to information from the world around them. This info is gathered from the five senses. Perception is the root of all organizational behavior. Any situation can be analyzed in terms of its perceptual connotation. It is people’s perception of reality that provides the fuel which drives their attitude formation and possibly their actual behavior. Through perception, people process info inputs into responses involving feelings and action. Perception is a way of forming impressions about oneself, other people and daily life experiences. The quality or accuracy of a person’s perceptions has a major impact on his/her response to a given situation. FACTORS INFLUENCING PERCEPTION The factors that contribute to perceptual differences and the perceptual process among people at work include characteristics of the perceiver, the setting and the perceived. The perceiver A person’s past experiences, needs or motives, personality, values and attitudes may all influence the perceptual process. Psychologists call these factors and individual’s perceptual set, which comprises those factors that predetermine an individual’s ability to perceive particular stimuli and respond in characteristic ways. The setting The physical, social and organizational context of the perceptual setting also can influence the perceptual process. The perceived Characteristics of the perceived person, object or event are also important in the perceptual process. STAGES OF THE PERCEPTUAL PROCESS Attention and selection Selective screening lets in only a tiny proportion of all the info available. Some of the selectivity comes from controlled processing which refers, within the topic of perception, to conscious decisions made to pay attention to certain stimuli while ignoring others. In this case, the perceivers are aware that they are processing info. Screening can also take place without the perceiver’s conscious awareness. It is the umbrella term for the ways we selectively perceive objects and people. Organization It is still necessary to find ways to organize the info efficiently. Schemas are cognitive frameworks that represent organized knowledge about a given concept or stimulus developed through experience. Person schemas refer to the way individuals sort others into categories. 7 A prototype is the perception of a person based on group characteristics from which the individual person may diverge. Stereotyping describes the process by which we attribute characteristics to an individual based on our understanding of wider groups. A script schema is defined as a knowledge framework that describes the appropriate sequence of events in a given situation. Interpretation Once your attention has been drawn to certain stimuli and you have grouped or organized this info, the next step is to uncover the reasons behind the actions. That is, even if your attention is called to the same info and you organize it the same way as someone else, you may interpret it differently or make different attributions about the reasons behind what you have perceived. Retrieval The info stored in our memory must be retrieved if it is to be used. This leads us to the retrieval stage. All of us at times find it hard to retrieve info stored in our memory. Our memory decays so that only some of the info is retrieved. Schemas play an important role in this area. They make it difficult for people to remember things not included in them. COMMON PERCEPTUAL DISTORTIONS Distortions can render the perceptual process inaccurate and affect the lives of others in a profound way. Stereotypes or prototypes Stereotypes obscure individual differences from getting to know people as individuals and from accurately assessing their needs, preferences and abilities. Halo effect It occurs when one attribute of a person or situation is used to develop an overall impression of the individual or situation. Within interpersonal perception, the effect occurs when our perception of another person is framed on the basis of a single striking favorable characteristic. Selective perception It refers to the ways in which we categorize and organize stimuli leading us to perceive the world in a unique way. It includes a tendency to single out those aspects of a situation, person or object that are consistent with one’s needs, values or attitudes. Projection It involves projecting our own emotions or motives onto another person. Contrast effects They occur within the process of perception when an object or person is perceived owing to their standing out from their surroundings or group. Self-fulfilling prophecies It is the tendency to create or find in another situation or individual that which you expected to find in the first place. 10 ATTITUDES They are influenced by values, but they focus on specific people or objects. The affective component of an attitude is a specific feeling regarding the personal impact of the antecedents. An attitude results in intended behavior. Cognitive dissonance describes a state of inconsistency between an individual’s attitudes and his/her behavior. A NEW SET OF VALUES AND ATTITUDES: GLOBAL MANAGERIAL COMPETENCIES Global managers must develop key global and cultural competencies: • Cultural self-awareness • Cultural consciousness • Ability to lead multicultural teams • Ability to negotiate across cultures • Global mindset Chapter 4 – ENGAGEMENT OF EMPLOYEES IN THE WORKPLACE INTRODUCTION Motivation is a complex issue involving a combination of both intrinsic and extrinsic factors, yet the pressure on organizations to harness this motivation into employee productivity has never been greater because of the turbulent business environment, intensity of competition created by globalization, demographic changes and technological development. Focusing on money as a motivator is part of the old style management world. The economic slump offers business leaders a chance to more effectively reward talented employees by emphasizing non-financial motivators, rather than bonuses. Companies are cutting back their financial incentive programs, yet few of them have used other ways of motivating staff. Numerous studies have concluded that, for people with satisfactory salaries, non-financial motivators are more effective than extra cash in building long-term employee engagement. The survey specifically identified three non-cash motivators as no less, or even more, effective than the three highest-rating financial incentives (cash bonuses, increased base pay and stock options). The three non-financial motivators they found effective were: • Praise from immediate managers • Leadership attention (such as one-on-one conversations) • A chance to lead projects or task forces. The degree of effort expended to achieve these outcomes will depend on: • The individual's willingness to perform, and his or her commitment to these outcomes in terms of the value attached to a particular outcome • The individual's competency or capacity to perform the tasks • The individual's personal assessment of the probability of attaining a specific outcome. • The opportunity to perform. A number of organizational constraints or barriers, if not minimized, may restrict levels of individual performance. If the outcome or goal is attained then the individual experiences a reduction in pressure or tension and goal attainment positively reinforces the expended effort to achieve the outcome. As a result of this positive experience, the individual may repeat the cycle. On the other 11 hand, if the outcome is frustrated after a reasonable passage of time then the individual experiences goal frustration and arrives at a decision point. The individual is presented with three alternatives: • Exit from the organization • Renew attempts at goal achievement, or modify or abandon the goals • Adopt a negative response to the frustration experience and perform at a sub-optimum level The challenge for managers is to create organizations in which the opportunities to perform through competency building and empowerment are maximized and the impediments to performance are kept to a minimum to avoid the negative consequences of goal frustration. CONTENT AND PROCESS MOTIVATION THEORIES The two main approaches to the study of motivation, developed since the 1950s and still widely promoted today, are known as the content and process theories. Content theories are primarily concerned with what it is within individuals or their environment that energizes and sustains behavior. In other words, what specific needs or motives. They are useful because they help managers to understand what people will and will not value as work rewards or need satisfiers. Process theories strive to provide an understanding of the thought or cognitive processes that take place within the minds of individuals to influence their behavior. Thus, a content theory may suggest that security is an important need. A process theory may go further by suggesting how and why a need for security could be linked to specific rewards and to the specific actions that the worker may need to perform to achieve these rewards. They add a cognitive dimension by focusing on individuals' beliefs about how certain behaviors will lead to rewards such as money or promotion, that is the assumed connection between work activities and the satisfaction of needs. CONTENT THEORIES Each of these content theories has made a major contribution to our understanding of work motivation from an individual's perspective. MASLOW’S HIERARCHY OF NEEDS THEORY It identifies five distinct levels of individual needs from self-actualization and esteem at the top (higher-order needs) to social, safety and physiological requirements at the bottom (lower-order needs). ALDERFER'S ERG THEORY It is based on needs but is more flexible than Maslow’s theory in three basic respects. First, the theory collapses Maslow's five need categories into three: • Existence needs relate to a person's desire for physiological and material well-being. • Relatedness needs represent the desire for satisfying interpersonal relationships. • Growth needs relate to the desire for continued personal growth and development. Second, where Maslow's theory argues that individuals progress up a needs hierarchy as a result of the satisfaction of lower-order needs (a satisfaction-progression process), ERG theory includes a frustration-regression principle, whereby an already satisfied lower-level need can become activated when a higher-level need cannot be satisfied. Thus, if a person is continually frustrated in their attempts to satisfy growth needs, relatedness needs will again surface as key motivators. 12 Third, according to Maslow, a person focuses on one need at a time. In contrast, ERG theory contends that more than one need may be activated at the same time. MCCLELLAND’S ACQUIRED NEEDS THEORY The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) is a way of measuring human needs. It consists in a projective technique that asks people to view pictures and write stories about what they see. It is normally associated with personality testing. McClelland, however, used it to collect data on motivation. McClelland identifies three themes in these TAT stories, with each corresponding to an underlying need that he believes is important for understanding individual behavior. These needs are: • Need for achievement (nAch) - the desire to do something better or more efficiently, to solve problems or to master complex tasks. • Need for affiliation (nAff) - the desire to establish and maintain friendly and warm relations with others. • Need for power (nPower) - the desire to control others, to influence their behavior or to be responsible for others. McClelland's basic theory is that these three needs are acquired over time, as a result of life experiences. Individuals are motivated by these needs, which can be associated with different work roles and preferences. The theory encourages managers to learn how to identify the presence of nAch, nAff and nPower in themselves and in others and to create work environments that are responsive to the respective need profiles of different employees. The research lends considerable insight into nAch. In particular, McClelland's theory challenges and rejects the research of other psychologists who suggest that the need to achieve is a behavior that is only acquired and developed during early childhood: if it is not obtained then it cannot easily be learned or achieved during adult life. McClelland maintains that the need to achieve is a behavior that an individual can acquire through appropriate training in adulthood. Societal culture can make a difference in the emphasis on nAch. There are two especially relevant managerial applications of McClelland's theory. • The theory is particularly useful when each need is linked with a set of work preferences. • If these needs can truly be acquired, it may be possible to acquaint people with the need profiles required to succeed in various types of jobs. HERZBERG'S TWO-FACTOR THEORY Frederick Heraberg took a different approach to examining motivation. Using a critical incident interviewing technique. He asked workers to comment on two statements: • Tell me about a time when you felt exceptionally good about your job. • Tell me about a time when you felt exceptionally bad about your job. Herzberg and his associates developed the two-factor theory, also known as the motivator-hygiene theory. They noticed that the factors identified as sources of work dissatisfaction (subsequently called dissatisfiers or hygiene factors) were different from those identified as sources of satisfaction (subsequently called satisfiers or motivator factors). According to Herzberg's two-factor theory, an individual employee could be simultaneously both satisfied and dissatisfied because each of these two factors has a different set of drivers and is recorded on a separate scale. 15 also focuses on both distributive justice - the perceived fairness of the amount of the reward employees received - and procedural justice - the perceived fairness of the process used to determine the distribution of rewards among employees. VROOM’S EXPECTANCY THEORY It seeks to predict or explain the task-related effort expended by a person. The theory's central question is: What determines the willingness of an individual to exert personal effort to work at tasks that contribute to the performance of the team and the organization. Individuals are viewed as making conscious decisions to allocate their behavior towards work efforts and to serve self-interests. The three key terms in the theory are as follows. • Expectancy is the probability that the individual assigns to work effort being followed by a given level of achieved task performance. • Instrumentality is the probability that the individual assigns to a given level of achieved task performance leading to various work outcomes that are rewarding for them. • Valence represents the value that the individual attaches to various work reward outcomes. Expectancy theory argues that work motivation is determined by individual beliefs about effort – performance relationships and the desirability of various work outcomes from different performance levels. Simply, the theory is based on the logic that people will do what they can do when they want to. Multiplier Effects and Multiple Outcomes Vroom posits that motivation (M), expectancy (E), instrumentality (I) and valence (V) are related to one another by the equation: M = E*I*V. This relationship means that the motivational appeal of a given work path is sharply reduced whenever any one or more of these factors approaches the value of zero. Conversely, for a given reward to have a high and positive motivational impact as a work outcome, the expectancy, instrumentality and valence associated with the reward must all be high and positive. Expectancy theory predicts that motivation to work hard to earn the merit pay will be low if individuals: • Feel they cannot achieve the necessary performance level (expectancy) • Are not confident a high level of task performance will result in a high merit pay rise (instrumentality) • Place little value (valence) on a merit pay increase • Experience any combination of these Managerial Implications Expectancy logic argues that a manager must try to understand individual thought processes and then actively intervene in the work situation to influence them. This includes trying to maximize work expectancies, instrumentalities and valences that support the organization's production purposes. In other words, a manager should strive to create a work setting in which the individual will also value work contributions serving the organization's needs as paths towards desired personal outcomes or rewards. The manager can identify individual needs or outcomes important to each individual and then try to adjust available rewards to match these. In this sense the theory can be universally applied. Each individual may be different, though different cultural patterns of values will affect valence of rewards 16 across cultures. It may also be possible to change the individual's perceptions of the valence of various outcomes. The Research Extrinsic rewards are positively valued work outcomes that the individual receives from some other person in the work setting. Intrinsic rewards are positively valued work outcomes that the individual receives directly as a result of task performance; they do not require the participation of another person. INTEGRATING CONTENT AND PROCESS MOTIVATION THEORIES More modern approaches argue for a combined approach that points out where and when various motivation theories work best. First, the various content theories have a common theme. Content theorists disagree somewhat as to the exact nature of human needs, but they do agree that: Individual needs activate tensions that influence attitudes and behavior. The manager's job is to create a work environment that responds positively to individual needs. The motivational value of rewards (intrinsic and extrinsic) can also be analyzed in terms of activated needs to which a given reward either does or does not respond. Ultimately, managers must understand that individuals have different needs and place different importance on different needs. Managers must also know what to offer individuals to respond to their needs and to create work settings that give people the opportunity to satisfy their needs through their contributions to task, work unit and organizational performance. PORTER AND LAWLER'S MODEL The model is an extension of Vroom's original expectancy theory. Individual attributes and work effort and the manager's ability to create a work setting that positively responds to individual needs and goals all affect performance. Whether a work setting can satisfy needs depends on the availability of rewards (extrinsic and intrinsic). The content theories enter the model as the manager's guide to understanding individual attributes and identifying the needs that give motivational value to the various work rewards allocated to employees. Managers are also interested in promoting high levels of individual satisfaction as a part of their concern for human resource maintenance. Motivation, performance and satisfaction can all occur when rewards are allocated on the basis of past performance (that is when rewards are performance contingent), but motivation can also occur when job satisfaction results from rewards that are felt to be equitably allocated. When felt negative inequity results, satisfaction will be low and motivation will be reduced. Thus, the integrated model includes a key role for equity theory and recognizes job performance and satisfaction as separate but potentially interdependent work results. CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES ON MOTIVATION THE FOUR BASIC DRIVES OF MOTIVATION MODEL The four basic drives of motivation are the drive to acquire, the drive to bond, the drive to comprehend and the drive to defend. • The drive to acquire. We are all driven to acquire scarce goods that bolster our sense of well- being. • The drive to bond. When met, this is associated with strong positive emotions like love and caring and, when not met, with negative ones like loneliness. At work the drive to bond accounts for the enormous boost in motivation when employees feel proud of the organization and for their loss of morale when the institution lets them down. 17 • The drive to comprehend. We want to make sense of the world around us, to produce theories and accounts that make events comprehensible and suggest reasonable actions and responses. At work this accounts for the desire to make a meaningful contribution and explains why employees are motivated by jobs that challenge them and allow them to learn and grow. • The drive to defend. We naturally defend ourselves, our family and friends, our property and our accomplishments. This drive manifests itself not just as aggressive or defensive behavior but also in a quest to promote justice and feelings of security and can explain why some employees are more resistant to change than others. Whilst each of the four drives is independent, they cannot be hierarchically ordered or substituted for one another. So you can't just pay your employees a lot and hope they will feel enthusiastic about their work; to fully motivate your employees you must address all four drives but each drive can be best met by a distinct organizational lever. THE ORGANIZATIONAL LEVERS OF MOTIVATION • The reward system. The drive to acquire is most easily satisfied by an organization's reward system - how effectively it discriminates between good and poor performers, ties rewards to performance and gives the best people opportunities for advancement. • Culture. The most effective way to fulfil the drive to bond - to engender a strong sense of camaraderie - is to create a culture that promotes teamwork, collaboration, openness and friendship. • Job design. The drive to comprehend is best addressed by designing jobs that are meaningful, interesting and challenging. • Performance management and resource allocation processes. Fair, trustworthy and transparent processes for performance management and resources allocation help to meet people's drive to defend. THE ROLE OF THE IMMEDIATE MANAGER The model posits that employee motivation is influenced by a complex system of managerial and organizational factors, but the research suggests that an organization's ability to full all four basic emotional needs will lead to increased motivation, which they argue can boost company performance. Two notes of caution need to be made here, first it is, as yet, only a theory developed from survey evidence from employees of successful companies and, second, as yet the theory has not been tested (that is there is no empirical evidence), but it does add an interesting new dimension to the debate on motivation. SELF-CONCEPT AND MOTIVATION Self-concept is the concept that individuals have of themselves as physical, social and spiritual or moral beings. The self-concept approach comes from personality theory. It focuses on using the concept of the self as an underlying force that motivates behavior, which gives it direction and energy and sustains it. Self-concept is derived from many influences including family, social identity and reference groups, education and experience. Generally speaking, these aspects of personality are a guide to our behavior and help us to decide what to do in specific situations. The self-concept approach relies on the other ways of understanding motivation to explain the full range of motivational behavior. 20 • Discriminate clearly between high and low performers in the amount of pay reward received • Avoid confusing merit aspects of a pay increase with cost-of-living adjustments. Performance is difficult to measure, all employees should receive a traditional salary or wage, and that all future pay rises should be administered uniformly across the company to encourage cooperation and teamwork. There are potential problems in linking pay to performance. However, many human resource experts and headhunters emphasize the importance of rewarding high performers for a private company's ability to attract top talent in a competitive global marketplace. PAYING FOR PERFORMANCE The concept of linking pay with performance is controversial. Most employers would agree that quality employees deserve higher pay than underperforming employees. However, exactly what constitutes a quality employee' is problematic. Performance measurements are largely based on the perceptions of immediate supervisors; they are subjective and not based on specific criteria, and therefore can cause a sense of unfairness for many employees. EMPOWERMENT Empowerment is the process by which managers delegate power to employees to motivate greater responsibility in balancing the achievement of both personal and organizational goals. Self-efficacy refers to a person's belief that they can perform adequately in a situation, and to a state of mind or mentality, which is why its relationship with empowerment strategies is important. Some work on empowerment has identified the following stages in the empowerment process: Stage 1: Identify the conditions contributing to low self-efficacy. This could include organizational factors (such as poor communication systems and an impersonal bureaucratic climate); supervisory style factors (such as authoritarianism, an emphasis on failure or lack of communication of reasons for action or inaction); reward factors (such as rewards that are not performance based, or the low incentive value of rewards); and job design factors (such as unclear roles, unrealistic goals, low levels of participation and low job enrichment). Stage 2 Employ empowerment strategies and techniques that help to vest substantial responsibility in the hands of the individual who is closest to the problem requiring a solution: • Cultivate service wisdom. Trained and multi-skilled employees should be able to handle non-routine situations, to understand the bigger picture and how their role affects other employees and the achievement of organizational goals. • Encourage job mastery. Provide coaching, training and appropriate experiences to ensure successful job performance. • Create freedom to act. Treat employees as if they own their jobs, devolving power so employees can adequately resolve problems. Managers should set appropriate boundaries to the freedom to facilitate successful employee job performance without creating inappropriate license. • Provide emotional support. Employees must feel that if they act within the designated boundaries then managers will support their actions even if they make mistakes. Such support helps reduce stress and anxiety through clearer role definition, task support and concern for employee well-being. • Provide appropriate feedback. Employees need regular and detailed feedback so they know how they are performing against managerial expectations. 21 • Share the power. Share as much power as possible, allowing for employee experience, education and task difficulty. • Demonstrate active listening skills. Learn to listen to feedback from experienced employees because the person performing the task often has the best ideas on process improvement. • Learn how to let go. Treat employees as partners and equals rather than as subordinates and know when to let go when their work is successfully helping the business move in the right direction. • Encourage diversity of approach. Employees should have the discretion to use various job styles and methods provided they meet agreed organizational standards for the work. • Develop participative management skills. Encourage employees to participate in major decisions that affect their daily working lives directly. • Encourage modeling. Employees should be able to observe and model their work on examples of 'best practice' performance in particular skills and competency-based areas relevant to their own work assignments. • Create job enrichment. Enrich jobs by making employees more accountable and responsible for key aspects of their work performance. Stage 3 Provide self-efficacy information directly to the employee. This stage focuses on modifying employee behavior and increasing the self-efficacy belief. Four approaches have been identified: • Competency building. Structure training and organizational learning so that employees acquire new skills through successive, moderate increments in task complexity and responsibility. • Encouragement and persuasion. Use verbal feedback and other persuasive techniques to encourage and reinforce successful job performance. • Emotional support. Provide emotional support for employees and minimize emotional arousal states such as anxiety, stress and the fear associated with making mistakes. Mistakes should be seen as part of the learning process. • Modelling. Allow employees to observe workers who perform successfully on the job. Both stages 2 and 3 are designed to remove and eradicate the conditions identified in stage 1, and to develop the positive feelings of self-efficacy within the individual employee. Stage 4 Create a can do mentality and an empowering experience for the employee. If stages 2 and 3 are successful, they will increase the employee's effort-performance understanding. As we saw earlier in the chapter, expectancy theories of motivation are essential for high and sustained levels of performance. Here, performance is linked directly to the positive mentality of the individual. 22 THE DARK SIDE OF ENGAGING EMPLOYEES: OVER- ENGAGEMENT AND BURNOUT Employee engagement and burnout are linked. Burnout is defined as a state of physical, emotional and mental exhaustion caused by long-term involvement in situations that are emotionally demanding. Burnout can be found in all industry sectors and across a range of jobs. Employee well-being provides a framework by which both academics and practitioners can address employee performance in a positive way. Cartwright and Holmes argue that employee well-being remains fundamental to the study of work and a primary consideration for how organizations can achieve competitive advantage and sustainable work practices. However, at what point does an organization (or probably the senior management team) have to weigh up the costs of supporting and facilitating employee well-being act in the opposite direction of organizational goals, such as financial austerity through cost savings. Burnout constitutes the negative pole of a continuum of employee well-being, of which work engagement constitutes the opposite positive pole. Chapter 9 - LEADERSHIP THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT Management • It is concerned with promoting stability and enabling the organization to run smoothly. • Process: involves planning, organizing, leading and controlling the use of organizational resources. • Sees and solves problems. • Managers are concerned with problem-solving and making things happen within a stable context. Leadership • Its role is to inspire, promote and oversee initiatives to do with long-term change. • It is a special case of interpersonal influence that gets an individual or group to do what the leader wants done. • Works in a broader and longer-term way. • Leaders provide inspiration, create opportunities and coach and motivate people to gain their support on fundamental long-term choices. • It can be formal leadership, which is the process of exercising influence from a position of formal authority in an organization. • Or it can be an informal leadership, which is the process of exercising influence through special skills or resources that meet the needs of other people. LEADERSHIP THEORIES BASED ON TRAIT AND LEADER CHARACTERISTICS TRAIT THEORY This approach tried to separate leaders from non-leaders, or effective leaders from less effective leaders. Certain traits are related to success and these traits, once identified, can be used to select leaders. Early research concentrated on leaders who were usually at the top of highly successful organizations or were remarkable in their ability to influence others to make dramatic change. They looked for general traits, cutting across all circumstances and organizations, and considered traits such as height,