Case study

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11.1

Personality and Individual Behavior

MAJOR QUESTION In the hiring process, do employers care about one’s personality and individual traits?

THE BIG PICTURE

Personality consists of stable psychological and behavioral attributes that give you your identity. We describe five personality dimensions and five personality traits that managers need to be aware of to understand workplace behavior.

In this and the next four chapters we discuss the third management function (after planning and organizing)—namely, leading. Leading, as we said in  Chapter 1 , is defined as motivating, directing, and otherwise influencing people to work hard to achieve the organization’s goals.

How would you describe yourself? Are you outgoing? aggressive? sociable? tense? passive? lazy? quiet? Whatever the combination of traits, which result from the interaction of your genes and your environment, they constitute your personality. More formally,  personality  consists of the stable psychological traits and behavioral attributes that give a person his or her identity. 10  As a manager, you need to understand personality attributes because they affect how people perceive and act within the organization. 11

The Big Five Personality Dimensions

In recent years, the many personality dimensions have been distilled into a list of factors known as the Big Five. 12  The  Big Five personality dimensions are (1) extroversion, (2) agreeableness, (3) conscientiousness, (4) emotional stability, and (5) openness to experience.

· Extroversion. How outgoing, talkative, sociable, and assertive a person is.

· Agreeableness. How trusting, good-natured, cooperative, and soft-hearted one is.

· Conscientiousness. How dependable, responsible, achievement-oriented, and persistent one is.

· Emotional stability. How relaxed, secure, and unworried one is.

· Openness to experience. How intellectual, imaginative, curious, and broad-minded one is.

Current estimates are that approximately 76% of organizations with more than 100 employees now use some sort of pre- or post-hiring assessment, including personality tests,13 spending more than $500 million annually on such services.14 Companies use these tests, believing that hiring decisions will be more accurate and predictive of high performers. But are they? We’ll discuss this shortly. Dimensions in the Big Five have been associated with performance, leadership behavior, turnover, creativity, and workplace safety.15 Do you wonder if your personality has affected your behavior at work?

Sociable and assertive. Does it take a certain kind of personality to be a good salesperson? Have you ever known people who were quiet, unassuming, even shy but who were nevertheless very persistent and persuasive—that is, good salespeople?© Blend Images/Alamy RFPage 359

Where do you think you stand in terms of the Big Five? You can find out by completing  Self-Assessment 11.1 .

SELF-ASSESSMENT 11.1  

Where Do You Stand on the Big Five Dimensions of Personality?

This survey is designed to assess your personality, using the Big Five index. Please be prepared to answer these questions if your instructor has assigned Self-Assessment 11.1 in Connect.

1. What is your personality profile, according to the Big Five?

2. Which of the Big Five is most likely going to help you achieve good grades in your classes and gain employment after graduation?

The Proactive Personality 

A person who scores well on the Big Five dimension of conscientiousness is probably a good worker. He or she may also be a  proactive personality, someone who is more apt to take initiative and persevere to influence the environment. Research reveals that proactive people tend to be more satisfied with their job and committed to their employer, as well as produce more work, than nonproactive individuals. 16

Do Personality Tests Work for the Workplace?

Personality tests are more commonly used to hire managers than entry-level employees (80% and 59% of the time, respectively).17 Nevertheless, many experts conclude personality tests are not a valid predictor of job performance.18 One explanation for this finding is that test takers don’t describe themselves accurately, instead guessing answers that might make them look better. Another is that companies use “off-the-shelf” tests possessing limited validity. You should avoid administering such tests. To overcome these limitations, companies like Pymetrics and Knack use games to assess cognitive ability and decision making. Other companies are looking toward genetic testing.19

The table below will help managers avoid abuses and discrimination lawsuits when using personality and psychological testing for employment decisions. 20  (See  Table 11.1 .)

TABLE 11.1   Cautions about Using Personality Tests in the Workplace

•	Use professionals. Rely on reputable, licensed psychologists for selecting and overseeing the administration, scoring, and interpretation of personality and psychological tests. This is particularly important, since not every psychologist is expert at these kinds of tests.
•	Don’t hire on the basis of personality test results alone. Supplement any personality test data with information from reference checks, personal interviews, ability tests, and job performance records. Also avoid hiring people on the basis of specified personality profiles. As a case in point, there is no distinct “managerial personality.”
•	Be alert for gender, racial, and ethnic bias. Regularly assess any possible adverse impact of personality tests on the hiring of women and minorities. This is truly a matter of great importance, since you don’t want to find your company (or yourself) embroiled in a lawsuit at some point downstream.
•	Graphology tests don’t work, but integrity tests do. Personality traits and aptitudes cannot be inferred from samples of people’s penmanship, as proponents of graphology tests claim. However, dishonest job applicants can often be screened by integrity tests, since dishonest people are reportedly unable to fake conscientiousness, even on a paper-and-pencil test.

Core Self-Evaluations

A  core self-evaluation represents a broad personality trait comprising four positive individual traits: (1)  self-efficacy, (2)  self-esteem, (3)  locus of control, and (4)  emotional stability. Managers need to be aware of these personality traits so as to understand workplace behavior.

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1. Self-Efficacy: “I Can/Can’t Do This Task”

Self-efficacy  is the belief in one’s personal ability to do a task. This is about your personal belief that you have what it takes to successfully complete a specified task.

Have you noticed that those who are confident about their ability tend to succeed, whereas those preoccupied with failure tend not to? Indeed, high expectations of self-efficacy have been linked with all kinds of positives: not only success in varied physical and mental tasks but also reduced anxiety and increased tolerance for pain. 21  One study found that the sales performance of life-insurance agents was much better among those with high self-efficacy. 22  A meta-analysis involving 21,616 people also found significant positive correlation between self-efficacy and job performance. 23  Low self-efficacy is associated with  learned helplessness, the debilitating lack of faith in one’s ability to control one’s environment. 24

Self-efficacy. Former Marine Corps Staff Sgt. Charlie Linville, 30, shown here (left) with his climbing partner, Tim Medvetz. Linville reached the 29,029-foot summit of Mt. Everest in May 2016, becoming the first combat-wounded veteran to do so. He had already conquered some of the highest peaks in the world on one leg. He was injured while defusing bombs in Afghanistan in 2011, when an explosive device detonated, leading to the amputation of his right leg below the knee. Do you have a personal belief that you can succeed at great things? © Niranjan Shrestha/AP Photo

Among the implications for managers are the following:

· Assign jobs accordingly. Complex, challenging, and autonomous jobs tend to enhance people’s perceptions of their self-efficacy. Boring, tedious jobs generally do the opposite.

· Develop self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is a quality that can be nurtured. Employees with low self-efficacy need lots of constructive pointers and positive feedback. 25  Goal difficulty needs to match individuals’ perceived self-efficacy, but goals can be made more challenging as performance improves. 26  Small successes need to be rewarded. Employees’ expectations can be improved through guided experiences, mentoring, and role modeling. 27

2. Self-Esteem: “I Like/Dislike Myself”

How worthwhile, capable, and acceptable do you think you are? The answer to this question is an indicator of your  self-esteem, the extent to which people like or dislike themselves, their overall self-evaluation. 28 Page 361 Research offers some interesting insights about how high or low self-esteem can affect people and organizations.

· People with high self-esteem. Compared with people with low self-esteem, people with high self-esteem are more apt to handle failure better, to emphasize the positive, to take more risks, and to choose more unconventional jobs. 29  However, when faced with pressure situations, high-self-esteem people have been found to become egotistical and boastful. 30  Some have even been associated with aggressive and violent behavior.

· People with low self-esteem. Conversely, low-self-esteem people confronted with failure have been found to have focused on their weaknesses and to have had primarily negative thoughts. 31  Moreover, they are more dependent on others and are more apt to be influenced by them and to be less likely to take independent positions.

Self-esteem varies around the world. A survey of 13,000 students from 31 countries showed that self-esteem and life satisfaction were moderately related. The relationship was stronger in individualistic countries (United States, Canada, New Zealand) than collectivist cultures (Korea and Japan).32

Can self-esteem be improved? According to one study, “low self-esteem can be raised more by having the person think of desirable characteristics possessed rather than of undesirable characteristics from which he or she is free.” 33  Some ways in which managers can build employee self-esteem are shown below. (See  Table 11.2 .)

TABLE 11.2   Some Ways That Managers Can Boost Employee Self-Esteem

· Reinforce employees’ positive attributes and skills.

· Provide positive feedback whenever possible.

· Break larger projects into smaller tasks and projects.

· Express confidence in employees’ abilities to complete their tasks.

· Provide coaching whenever employees are seen to be struggling to complete tasks.

3. Locus of Control: “I Am/Am Not the Captain of My Fate”

As we discussed briefly in  Chapter 1 ,  locus of control indicates how much people believe they control their fate through their own efforts. If you have an internal locus of control, you believe you control your own destiny. If you have an external locus of control, you believe external forces control you.

Research shows internals and externals have important workplace differences. Internals exhibit less anxiety, greater work motivation, and stronger expectations that effort leads to performance. They also obtain higher salaries.34 Most importantly, one’s internal locus of control can be improved by providing more job autonomy.35

These findings have two important implications for managers:

· Expect different degrees of structure and compliance for each type. Employees with internal locus of control will probably resist close managerial supervision. Hence, they should probably be placed in jobs requiring high initiative and lower compliance. By contrast, employees with external locus of control might do better in highly structured jobs requiring greater compliance.

· Employ different reward systems for each type. Since internals seem to have a greater belief that their actions have a direct effect on the consequences of that action, internals likely would prefer and respond more productively to incentives such as merit pay or sales commissions. (We discuss incentive compensation systems in  Chapter 12 .)

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4. Emotional Stability: “I’m Fairly Secure/Insecure When Working under Pressure”

Emotional stability  is the extent to which people feel secure and unworried and how likely they are to experience negative emotions under pressure. People with low levels of emotional stability are prone to anxiety and tend to view the world negatively, whereas people with high levels tend to show better job performance.

Emotional Intelligence: Understanding Your Emotions and the Emotions of Others

Emotional intelligence (EI or EQ) has been defined as “the ability to carry out accurate reasoning about emotions and the ability to use emotions and emotional knowledge to enhance thought.” 36  Said another way,  emotional intelligence is the ability to monitor your and others’ feelings and to use this information to guide your thinking and actions. The trait of emotional intelligence was first introduced in 1909. Since that time some claim it to be the secret elixir to happiness and higher performance. Are you curious if research supports such lofty conclusions?

What Do We Know about EI?

Recent research underscores the importance of developing higher EI, but it does not confirm its lofty expectations. EI was moderately associated with (1) better social relations, well-being, and satisfaction across all ages and contexts, (2) higher creativity, (3) better emotional control, (4) conscientiousness and self-efficacy, and (5) self-rated performance. Interestingly, EI was not found to be a driver of supervisory ratings of performance.37 Daniel Goleman, a psychologist who popularized the trait of EI, concluded that EI is composed of four key components: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management.38 (See  Table 11.3 .)

TABLE 11.3   The Traits of Emotional Intelligence

1.	Self-awareness. The most essential trait. This is the ability to read your own emotions and gauge your moods accurately, so you know how you’re affecting others.
2.	Self-management. This is the ability to control your emotions and act with honesty and integrity in reliable and adaptable ways. You can leave occasional bad moods outside the office.
3.	Social awareness. This includes empathy, allowing you to show others that you care, and organizational intuition, so you keenly understand how your emotions and actions affect others.
4.	Relationship management. This is the ability to communicate clearly and convincingly, disarm conflicts, and build strong personal bonds.

Sources: For a current review, see D. Joseph, J. Jin, D. Newman, and E. O’Boyle, “Why Does Self-Reported Emotional Intelligence Predict Job Performance? A Meta-Analytic Investigation of Mixed EI,” Journal of Applied Psychology, March 2015, pp. 298–342. See the box titled “Get Happy Carefully” in D. Goleman, R. Boyatzis, and A. McKee, “Primal Leadership: The Hidden Driver of Great Performance,” Harvard Business Review, Special Issue: Breakthrough Leadership, December 2001, p. 49.

Can You Raise Your EI?

Is there any way to raise your own emotional intelligence, to sharpen your social skills? Although parts of EI represent stable traits that are not readily changed, other aspects, such as using empathy, can be developed. 39  Two suggestions for improvement are as follows:

· Develop awareness of your EI level. Becoming aware of your level of emotional intelligence is the first step. The self-assessment on following page can be used for this purpose. (Some companies use the Personal Profile Analysis during the hiring process to provide insights into a person’s EI.) 40

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Learn about areas needing improvement. The next step is to learn more about those EI aspects in which improvement is needed. For example, to improve your skills at using empathy, find articles on the topic and try to implement their recommendations. One such article suggests that empathy in communications is enhanced by trying to (1) understand how others feel about what they are communicating and (2) gaining appreciation of what people want from an exchange. 41

EXAMPLE

Emotional Intelligence: Does Empathy Work Better Than Self-interest?

When JetBlue identifies candidates for flight attendants, it not only uses psychological assessments, structured interviews, and the like, it also looks for the nicest people—and then something else: Using customer data analysis, it found that “being helpful trumps being nice,” as two JetBlue executives observed. Indeed, “being helpful even balances out the effect of somebody who is not so nice.”42 As a result of policies developed out of these insights—both reflections of emotional intelligence—customer feedback became more positive.

Is Compassion Good for the Bottom Line? A man named Drake, described as a “happy, generous, and other-focused person, … always interested in helping others whenever he can,” joined banker Bear Stearns, whose managers treated junior staff abusively, furthering an atmosphere of cut-throat competition. Drake was determined to follow his own values and as a senior staffer treated junior bankers with compassion and respect, as well as giving them more opportunities. As a result of one deal in which he gave a junior analyst much responsibility, she pitched a deal that turned out to be the most profitable of the year—catching the eye of senior management.43

YOUR CALL

Providing support for one another, including offering kindness and compassion when others are struggling. Inspiring one another at work. Avoiding blame and forgiving mistakes. Have you observed these expressions of EQ in a business situation? Do you think they pay off in a happier and even productive workplace?44

Both research and our experience suggest that your emotional intelligence can help or hurt your career. Would you like to know where you stand and what you might do to improve your level of emotional intelligence?

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11.2

Values, Attitudes, and Behavior

MAJOR QUESTION How do the hidden aspects of individuals—their values and attitudes—affect employee behavior?

THE BIG PICTURE

Organizational behavior (OB) considers how to better understand and manage people at work. In this section, we discuss individual values and attitudes and how they affect people’s actions and judgments.

If you look at a company’s annual report or at a brochure from its corporate communications department, you are apt to be given a picture of its formal aspects: Goals. Policies. Hierarchy. Structure.

Could you exert effective leadership if the formal aspects were all you knew about the company? What about the informal aspects? Values. Attitudes. Personalities. Perceptions. Conflicts. Culture. Clearly, you need to know about these hidden, “messy” characteristics as well. (See  Figure 11.1 , left.)

FIGURE 11.1  Formal and informal aspects of an organization

Organizational Behavior: Trying to Explain and Predict Workplace Behavior

The informal aspects are the focus of the interdisciplinary field known as  organizational behavior (OB), which is dedicated to better understanding and managing people at work. In particular, OB tries to help managers not only explain workplace behavior but also predict it, so that they can better lead and motivate their employees to perform productively. OB looks at two areas:

· Individual behavior. This is the subject of this chapter. We discuss such individual attributes as values, attitudes, personality, perception, and learning.

· Group behavior. This is the subject of later chapters, particularly  Chapter 13 , where we discuss norms, roles, and teams.

Let’s begin by considering individual values, attitudes, and behavior.

Values: What Are Your Consistent Beliefs and Feelings about All Things?

Values are abstract ideals that guide one’s thinking and behavior across all situations. 45  Lifelong behavior patterns are dictated by values that are fairly well set by the time people are in their early teens. After that, however, one’s values can be reshaped by significant life-altering events, such as having a child, undergoing a business failure, or surviving the death of a loved one, a war, or a serious health threat.

From a manager’s point of view, it’s helpful to know that values represent the ideals that underlie how we behave at work. Ideals such as concern for others, self-enhancement, independence, and security are common values in the workplace. 46  Managers who understand an employee’s values are better suited to assign them to meaningful projects and to help avoid conflicts between work activities and personal values.47

Attitudes: What Are Your Consistent Beliefs and Feelings about Specific Things?

Values are abstract ideals—global beliefs and feelings—that are directed toward all objects, people, or events. Values tend to be consistent both over time and over related situations.

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By contrast, attitudes are beliefs and feelings that are directed toward specific objects, people, or events. More formally, an  attitude is defined as a learned predisposition toward a given object. 48  It is important for you to understand the components of attitudes because attitudes directly influence our behavior. 49

Example: Job satisfaction is moderately associated with performance and strongly related to turnover.50 Unhappy workers are less likely to demonstrate high performance, while happy workers are less likely to quit. This is why it is important for managers to track employees’ attitudes and to understand their causes. For example, Earls, a Canadian chain of 65 restaurants with as many as 8,000 employees, has truly adopted this recommendation. The company sends short surveys measuring workplace attitudes to employees’ mobile devices every three months. According to The Wall Street Journal, Earls does this because management has concluded that “the components of engagement—employee happiness and commitment to the business—are exactly what drives sales, and therefore the bottom line.”51

The Three Components of Attitudes: Affective, Cognitive, and Behavioral

Attitudes have three components—affective, cognitive, and behavioral. 52

· The affective component—“I feel.” The  affective component of an attitude consists of the feelings or emotions one has about a situation. How do you feel about people who talk loudly on cell-phones in restaurants? If you feel annoyed or angry, you’re expressing negative emotions, or affect. (If you’re indifferent, your attitude is neutral.)

· The cognitive component—“I believe.” The  cognitive component of an attitude consists of the beliefs and knowledge one has about a situation. What do you think about people in restaurants talking on cell-phones? Is what they’re doing inconsiderate, acceptable, even admirable (because it shows they’re productive)? Your answer reflects your beliefs or ideas about the situation.

· The behavioral component—“I intend.” The  behavioral component of an attitude, also known as the intentional component, is how one intends or expects to behave toward a situation. What would you intend to do if a person talked loudly on a cell-phone at the table next to you? Your action may reflect your negative or positive feelings (affective), your negative or positive beliefs (cognitive), and your intention or lack of intention to do anything (behavioral).

All three components are often manifested at any given time. For example, if you call a corporation and get one of those telephone-tree menus (“For customer service, press 1 …”) that never seem to connect you to a human being, you might be so irritated that you would say

· “I hate being given the runaround.” [affective component—your feelings]

· “That company doesn’t know how to take care of customers.” [cognitive component—your perceptions]

· “I’ll never call them again.” [behavioral component—your intentions]

When Attitudes and Reality Collide: Consistency and Cognitive Dissonance

One of the last things you want, probably, is to be accused of hypocrisy—to be criticized for saying one thing and doing another. Like most people, you no doubt want to maintain consistency between your attitudes and your behavior.

But what if a strongly held attitude bumps up against a harsh reality that contradicts it? Suppose you’re extremely concerned about getting AIDS, which you believe you might get from contact with body fluids, including blood. Then you’re in a life-threatening auto accident in a third-world country and require surgery and blood transfusions—including transfusions of blood from (possibly AIDS-infected) strangers in a blood bank. Do you reject the blood to remain consistent with your beliefs about getting AIDS?

Leon Festinger. In 1957, the psychologist and his associates penetrated a cult whose members predicted that most people on earth would perish in a cataclysmic event, except for a handful who would be rescued by aliens in a flying saucer. Festinger found himself standing with cult members on a hilltop, awaiting the event, which, of course, did not happen. Later he proposed the term cognitive dissonance to explain how they rationalized the failure of their prophecy. Have you observed people employing this mechanism when the surefire thing they predicted did not occur?© Estate of Francis Bello/ Science Source

In 1957, social psychologist Leon Festinger proposed the term  cognitive dissonance to describe the psychological discomfort a person experiences between his or her MHHE:Page 366 cognitive attitude and incompatible behavior. 53  Because people are uncomfortable with inconsistency, Festinger theorized, they will seek to reduce the “dissonance,” or tension, of the inconsistency. How they deal with the discomfort, he suggested, depends on three factors:

· Importance. How important are the elements creating the dissonance? Most people can put up with some ambiguities in life. For example, many drivers don’t think obeying speed limits is very important, even though they profess to be law-abiding citizens. People eat greasy foods, even though they know that ultimately those foods may contribute to heart disease.

· Control. How much control does one have over the matters that create dissonance? A juror may not like the idea of voting the death penalty but believe that he or she has no choice but to follow the law in the case. A taxpayer may object to his taxes being spent on, say, special-interest corporate welfare for a particular company but not feel that he can withhold taxes.

· Rewards. What rewards are at stake in the dissonance? You’re apt to cling to old ideas in the face of new evidence if you have a lot invested emotionally or financially in those ideas. If you’re a police officer who worked 20 years to prove a particular suspect guilty of murder, you’re not apt to be very accepting of contradictory evidence after all that time.

The Practical Action box below provides an example of three key methods Festinger suggested to reduce cognitive dissonance.

PRACTICAL ACTION

Methods for Reducing Cognitive Dissonance

Suppose Juanita has a positive attitude about helping others. One day her boss asks her to work on a special project for an important new client—and it must get done in two months. The project represents significant revenue, and her boss even promises a bonus for successfully completing it on time. Juanita would like to use the bonus to purchase a new car. The rub is that two of her peers have also come to her, seeking help on their project. Juanita believes she is well suited to help them, given her past experience, but she feels it would take time away from completing her special project. Should she make time to help her peers or focus solely on the special project?

Festinger suggested three key ways Juanita can reduce the cognitive dissonance associated with her current situation:

· Change your attitude or behavior or both. Juanita could either (a) tell herself that she can’t help her peers because the special project is too important for the company or (b) schedule extra time each day or week to help her peers.

· Belittle the importance of the inconsistent behavior. Juanita could belittle (in the sense of “make small”) the belief that she needs to help peers every time they ask for assistance.

· Find consonant elements that outweigh dissonant ones. Juanita could tell herself that she can’t help because the company needs the revenue and she needs the bonus.

YOUR CALL

Have you found yourself in a similar dilemma? Which solution seemed to work best—or would work best—in your case?

Behavior: How Values and Attitudes Affect People’s Actions and Judgments

Values (global) and attitudes (specific) are generally in harmony, but not always. For example, a manager may put a positive value on helpful behavior (global) yet may have a negative attitude toward helping an unethical coworker (specific). Together, however, values and attitudes influence people’s workplace  behavior—their actions and judgments. ●

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EXAMPLE

How Values and Attitudes Affect Behavior: Thinking beyond Profit to Create Value for Society

As a manager, would you think most employees would agree that innovation is beneficial—that the original Silicon Valley firms prospered because they were constantly creating new products and services? Employees may have the value, then, that innovation is good—that it leads to productivity and profitability.

However, what if employees think that a company’s purpose is to be solely a money-making machine? They might have the attitude that social innovation is unnecessary, even discouraged.

The Thinking behind Great Companies. Great companies, suggests Rosabeth Moss Kanter of Harvard Business School, have broader values—and attitudes. Firms such as IBM, PepsiCo, and Procter & Gamble, she says, “work to make money, of course, but in their choices of how to do so, they think about building enduring institutions. … Society and people are not afterthoughts or inputs to be used and discarded but are core to their purpose.” 54  Balancing public interest with financial interest means that CEOs must expand their investments beyond profit-maximizing activities such as marketing and research and development and include employee empowerment, emotional engagement, values-based leadership, and related social contributions.

Ways of Creating Value. “Affirming purpose and values through service is a regular part of how great companies express their identities,” Kanter believes. Thus, JPMorgan Chase has The Fellowship Initiative, a program to help young American men of color achieve academic and professional success. Coca-Cola invests in small African mango plantations to help farmers in Africa gain livelihoods. Microsoft partners with nonprofit NETHope to create apprenticeships in information technology in Kenya. Gap Inc. has a program for teaching health awareness and literacy to women garment workers in Cambodia and India. The Disney Company provides conservation grants to protect wildlife.55 In West Africa, Procter & Gamble set up Pampers mobile clinics to reduce infant mortality by having health care professionals teach postnatal care, examine babies, and hand out Pampers diapers. “The emotional tugs for P&G employees are strong,” says Kanter; “they feel inspired by the fact that their product is at the center of a mission to save lives.”

YOUR CALL

Where do you think the inspiration for giving a firm a motivating purpose and values beyond making money should come from? Does it have to come from a company’s leaders? Do you think it could begin as voluntary activity, as with employees finding each other through company chat rooms and sharing ideas in their free time?

Creating value. The Nature Conservancy Disney Wilderness Preserve, consisting of 11,500 acres near Orlando, Florida, was created by the Disney Company to protect more than 1,000 species of plants and animals. It’s considered the “secret Disney park,” because few people know about it. © Ian Dagnall/Alamy

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11.3

Perception and Individual Behavior

MAJOR QUESTION What are the distortions in perception that can cloud one’s judgment?

THE BIG PICTURE

Perception, a four-step process, can be skewed by five types of distortion: stereotyping, implicit bias, the halo effect, the recency effect, and causal attribution. We also consider the self-fulfilling prophecy, which can affect our judgment as well.

If you were a smoker, which warning on a cigarette pack would make you think more about quitting? “Smoking seriously harms you and others around you”? A blunt “Smoking kills”? Or a stark graphic image showing decaying teeth?

This is the kind of decision public health authorities in various countries are wrestling with. (One study found that highly graphic images about the negative effects of smoking had the greatest impact on smokers’ intentions to quit.) 56  These officials, in other words, are trying to decide how perception might influence behavior.

The Four Steps in the Perceptual Process

Perception is the process of interpreting and understanding one’s environment. The process of perception is complex, but it can be boiled down to four steps. 57  (See  Figure 11.2 .)

FIGURE 11.2  The four steps in the perceptual process

In this book, we are less concerned about the theoretical steps in perception than in how perception is distorted, since this has considerable bearing on the manager’s judgment and job. In any one of the four stages of the perception process, misunderstandings or errors in judgment can occur. Perceptual errors can lead to mistakes that can be damaging to yourself, other people, and your organization.

Five Distortions in Perception

Although there are other types of distortion in perception, we will describe the following: (1) stereotyping, (2) implicit bias, (3) the halo effect, (4) the recency effect, and (5) causal attribution.

1. Stereotyping: “Those Sorts of People Are Pretty Much the Same”

If you’re a tall African American man, do people make remarks about basketball players? If you’re of Irish descent, do people believe you drink a lot? If you’re Jewish, do people think you’re money-oriented? If you’re a woman, do people think you’re automatically nurturing? All these are stereotypes.  Stereotyping is the tendency to attribute to an individual the characteristics one believes are typical of the group to which that individual belongs. 58

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Principal areas of stereotyping that should be of concern to you as a manager are (1) sex-role stereotypes, (2) age stereotypes, and (3) race/ethnicity stereotypes. (People with disabilities, discussed in  Section 11.5 , are also apt to be stereotyped.)

Sex-Role Stereotypes

A sex-role stereotype is the belief that differing traits and abilities make males and females particularly well suited to different roles. Thus, for example, people tend to prefer male bosses (33%) to female bosses (20%) in a new job, according to a recent Gallup poll, even though the public generally views women as being every bit as capable as men at being leaders, according to Pew Research.59 (Reverse bias can occur when managers fighting bias against women overdo it and discriminate against men.)60

A summary of research revealed that

· Men were preferred for male-dominated jobs (such as firefighter), but there was no preference for either gender in female-dominated jobs (such as nurse).  

· Women have a harder time than men in being perceived as effective leaders. (The exception: Women were seen as more effective when the organization faced a crisis and needed a turnaround.)

· Women of color are more negatively affected by sex-role stereotypes than are white women or men in general.61 

Age Stereotypes

Another example of an inaccurate stereotype is the belief that older workers are less motivated, more resistant to change, less trusting, less healthy, and more likely to have problems with work–life balance. A recent study refuted all these negative beliefs about age.62 Unfortunately, these stereotypes likely fuel bias against older employees. A 2013 survey of 1,500 older workers, for example, showed that 92% considered bias against them “very” or “somewhat” commonplace.63

Race/Ethnicity Stereotypes

Studies of race-based stereotypes have demonstrated that people of color experienced more perceived discrimination and less psychological support than whites.64 Perceived racial discrimination was also associated with more negative work attitudes, physical health, psychological health, and organizational citizenship behavior.65

2. Implicit Bias: “I Really Don’t Think I’m Biased, but I Just Have a Feeling about Some People”

More than 85% of Americans consider themselves to be unprejudiced, but researchers conclude that most hold some degree of implicit racial bias.66

Explicit bias reflects attitudes or beliefs endorsed at a conscious level—for example, “I don’t let any teenage black men wearing hoodies come into my store; they might hold me up.”  Implicit bias  is the attitudes or beliefs that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner—for example, from several New York City police officers, “We had to shoot him, he seemed to be reaching for a gun.” (This was the 1999 shooting of Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo, who was killed when police fired 41 rounds as he pulled out his wallet.)67

Implicit bias has come more into the forefront of public discussion with the rise in the number of deaths of African Americans at the hands of the police in Ferguson, Missouri; in Cleveland; and on Staten Island in New York, among other places (as well as the 2016 shooting of several white police officers by an African American male in Dallas).68 But implicit bias also operates on more subtle levels: In one famous study, social scientists sent thousands of resumes with identical content to employers with job openings and measured which received callbacks for interviews. On some resumes, some stereotypically African American names were used (such as “Jamal”) and on others stereotypically white names were used (like “Brendan”). The same resume was roughly 50% more likely to result in callback for an interview if it had a “white” name.69

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If changing explicit bias is difficult, taking steps to root out implicit bias is even harder. Nevertheless, police departments, in particular, are taking great steps forward, requiring intergroup contact, positive feedback, clear norms of behavior, and similar matters.70

3. The Halo Effect: “One Trait Tells Me All I Need to Know”

We often use faces as markers for gender, race, and age, but face and body characteristics can lead us to fall back on cultural stereotypes. For example, height has been associated with perceptions of prosperity—high income—and occupational success. Excess weight can be stereotypically associated with negative traits such as laziness, incompetence, and lack of discipline.71 These examples illustrate the  halo effect, in which we form an impression of an individual based on a single trait. (The phenomenon is also called the horn-and-halo effect, because not only can a single positive trait be generalized into an array of positive traits but the reverse is also true.)

As if we needed additional proof that life is unfair, it has been shown that attractive people generally are treated better than unattractive people. Attractive members of Congress get more TV coverage, and attractive political candidates win more often. 72  Attractive students have higher expectations by teachers in terms of academic achievement. 73  Attractive employees are generally paid higher salaries than unattractive ones are, and attractive CEOs are paid more than less appealing CEOs. 74  (Male CEOs also tend to be taller—6 feet compared to an average man’s 5-feet-10.5 inches, in one Swedish study.) 75  Clearly, however, if a manager fails to look at all of an individual’s traits, he or she has no right to complain if that employee doesn’t work out.

EXAMPLE

The Halo Effect: Do Good Looks Make People Richer and Happier?

Are attractive employees paid more than ordinary (or unattractive) people for the same work? Are they happier? That would seem to be the case, according to a study involving more than 25,000 people worldwide. 76

$250,000 More. Five large surveys conducted from 1971 to 2009 in the United States, Britain, and Germany found that beautiful people earn an extra $250,000 during their careers than the least attractive people. In addition, says University of Texas economist Daniel Hamermesh, leader of the study, the best-looking people are more likely to remain employed, get promoted, find a higher-earning (and better-looking) spouse, and even get better deals on home loans. 77  Hamermesh is also author of Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful. 78  “In economic terms, beauty is scarce. People distinguish themselves and pay attention to beauty,” he says. “Companies realize that hiring better-looking people helps in various ways. In every market, whether it’s jobs or marriage, beauty matters.” 79  The result of all this is that beautiful people are generally happier people than ordinary folks. “The majority of beauty’s effect on happiness works through its impact on economic outcomes,” says Hamermesh. 80

Do Good Looks Produce Confident Communicators? Another study produces additional insights: 81

· Although beautiful people are no better than ordinary people at solving puzzles such as mazes, they are more self-confident about their abilities. “Being good looking,” says one article about the study, “seems to be strongly associated with self-confidence, a trait that is apparently attractive to employers.” 82

· When study subjects pretending to be employers looked only at resumes, physical appearance had no effect on their judgments, as you might expect. When photos, in-person interviews, and even phone interviews were involved, employers showed higher estimates for beautiful people’s productivity—especially when they had face-to-face interviews but even with telephone-only interviews, the result, apparently, of the effect of self-confidence that came across on the phone.

· Good-looking people are good communicators, which also contributes to employers’ positive perceptions.

The Halo Misperception. In sum, “Employers (wrongly) expect good-looking workers to perform better than their less-attractive counterparts under both visual and oral interaction,” said the researchers, “even after controlling for individual worker characteristics and worker confidence.” 83

YOUR CALL

Are you influenced in your judgment of people by how attractive they are? Do you think as a manager you could look beyond people’s physical appearance to be a good judge of their competence? Why?

Page 371 Handsomely compensated. Attractive employees are generally paid better than unattractive ones are. Why do you think that is? Do you think it’s inevitable?© Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock RF

4. The Recency Effect: “The Most Recent Impressions Are the Ones That Count”

The  recency effect is the tendency to remember recent information better than earlier information, perhaps because when you activate your recall, the later recollections are still present in working memory. 84  You see this misperception often operating among investors (even professionals), who are more likely to buy a stock if they see something about it in the news or if it has a high one-day return. 85

EXAMPLE

The Recency Effect: Performance Reviews, Student Evaluations, and Investment Decisions

Not just a few employees have had the experience of making some mistake happen recently, and then it ends up being “the entire topic of your performance review even if you’ve done a great job the rest of the year,” as one writer points out.86 This is just one example of the recency effect in action.

Another is when students do their own “performance reviews”—do student course evaluations of their professors. Here, too, their ratings may be affected by course activities that are closer to the time of the formal appraisal.87

The recency effect appears quite frequently among stock market investors. “People extrapolate what just happened into more of the same,” says one wealth fund manager.88 That is, people leap into holdings that are doing well and cash out investments that are doing poorly, forgetting that at some point the trends will be reversed.

YOUR CALL

Why does the recency effect occur? Like other habits, it makes things easier, says one financial planner. “Because it’s easier, we’re inclined to use our recent experience as the baseline for what will happen in the future.”89 What decision(s) would you admit to making in which you were influenced by the recency effect?

5. Causal Attributions

Causal attribution is the activity of inferring causes for observed behavior. Rightly or wrongly, we constantly formulate cause-and-effect explanations for our own and others’ behavior. Attributional statements such as the followingPage 372 are common: “Joe drinks too much because he has no willpower, but I need a few drinks after work because I’m under a lot of pressure.”

Even though our causal attributions tend to be self-serving and are often invalid, it’s important to understand how people formulate attributions because they profoundly affect organizational behavior. For example, a supervisor who attributes an employee’s poor performance to a lack of effort might reprimand that person. However, training might be deemed necessary if the supervisor attributes the poor performance to a lack of ability.

As a manager, you need to be alert to two attributional tendencies that can distort one’s interpretation of observed behavior—the fundamental attribution bias and the self-serving bias.

· Fundamental attribution bias. In the  fundamental attribution bias, people attribute another person’s behavior to his or her personal characteristics rather than to situational factors.

Example: A study of manufacturing employees found that top managers attributed the cause of industrial back pain to individuals, whereas workers attributed it to the environment. 90

· Self-serving bias. In the  self-serving bias, people tend to take more personal responsibility for success than for failure.

Example: Europeans blamed Wall Street for the 2010 economic collapse in Greece. However, a Wall Street Journal article points out that a close look at Greece’s finances “over the nearly 10 years since it adopted the euro shows not only that Greece was the principal author of its debt problems, but also that fellow European governments repeatedly turned a blind eye to its flouting of rules.” 91

The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, or Pygmalion Effect

The  self-fulfilling prophecy, also known as the  Pygmalion (“pig-mail-yun”)  effect, describes the phenomenon in which people’s expectations of themselves or others lead them to behave in ways that make those expectations come true.

Expectations are important. An example is a waiter who expects some poorly dressed customers to be stingy tippers, who therefore gives them poor service and so gets the result he or she expected—a much lower tip than usual. Research has shown that by raising managers’ expectations for individuals performing a wide variety of tasks, higher levels of achievement and productivity can be achieved. 92

The lesson for you as a manager is that when you expect employees to perform badly, they probably will, and when you expect them to perform well, they probably will. (In the G. B. Shaw play Pygmalion, a speech coach bets he can get a lower-class girl to change her accent and her demeanor so that she can pass herself off as a duchess. In six months, she successfully “passes” in high society, having assumed the attributes of a woman of sensitivity and taste.)

Research in a variety of industries and occupations shows that the effect of the self-fulfilling prophecy can be quite strong.93 That is, managerial expectations powerfully influence employee behavior and performance. Among the things managers can do to create positive performance expectations: Recognize that everyone has the potential to increase his or her performance. Introduce new employees as if they have outstanding potential. Encourage employees to visualize the successful execution of tasks. Help them master key skills.94

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11.4

Work-Related Attitudes and Behaviors Managers Need to Deal With

MAJOR QUESTION Is it important for managers to pay attention to employee attitudes?

THE BIG PICTURE

Attitudes are important because they affect behavior. Managers need to be alert to the key work-related attitudes having to do with engagement, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment. Among the types of employee behavior they should attend to are their on-the-job performance and productivity, absenteeism and turnover, organizational citizenship behaviors, and counterproductive work behaviors.

“Keep the employees happy,” we often hear. It’s true that attitudes are important, the reason being that attitudes affect behavior. But is keeping employees happy all that managers need to know to get results? We discuss motivation for performance in the next chapter. Here, let us consider what managers need to know about key work-related attitudes and behaviors.

Three types of attitudes managers are particularly interested in are (1) employee engagement, (2) job satisfaction, and (3) organizational commitment.

1. Employee Engagement: How Connected Are You to Your Work?

Research on job involvement has evolved into the study of an individual difference called  employee engagement, defined as an individual’s involvement, satisfaction, and enthusiasm for work. 95  Engaged employees are expected to have feelings of urgency, intensity, and enthusiasm, as well as focus, which make them more committed to their employer and to put more effort into their jobs. 96  In other words, such employees “give their all” at work.

The U.S. workforce displays above-average global levels of engagement, according to consulting firm Aon Hewitt. The firm’s 15-year study of engagement shows worldwide levels at 62% in comparison to a North American rate of 66%. This bodes well for the U.S. workforce because highly engaged employees can achieve 12% higher customer satisfaction/loyalty, 18% more productivity, and 12% greater profitability.97 Other recent academic studies similarly showed a positive relationship between employee engagement, performance, and physical and psychological well-being and corporate-level financial performance and customer satisfaction.98 Engaged employees tend to be positive or optimistic, proactive, and conscientious and to possess high levels of human and social capital.

Employees are also more likely to become engaged when an organization has the kind of culture that promotes employee development, recognition, and trust between management and employees. 99  Job security and feelings of psychological safety (when employees feel free of fear in trying new ideas) also propel job engagement. 100

Do you want to achieve higher grades in your classes? If yes, you will find that being engaged in your studies will help. You can determine your level of engagement with your studies by completing  Self-Assessment 11.3 . Results can be used to develop an engagement improvement plan.

SELF-ASSESSMENT 11.3  

To What Extent Are You Engaged in Your Studies?

The following survey was designed to assess your level of engagement in your studies. Please be prepared to answer these questions if your instructor has assigned Self-Assessment 11.3 in Connect.

1. What is your level of engagement?

2. Find your three lowest-rated items. Based on the content of these items, what can you do to improve your level of engagement? Hint: Doing this requires you to identify the cause of the low ratings for each item.

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2. Job Satisfaction: How Much Do You Like or Dislike Your Job?

Job satisfaction is the extent to which you feel positive or negative about various aspects of your work. Most people don’t like everything about their jobs. Their overall satisfaction depends on how they feel about several components, such as work, pay, promotions, coworkers, and supervision. 101  Among the key correlates of job satisfaction are stronger motivation, job involvement, organizational commitment, and life satisfaction and less absenteeism, tardiness, turnover, and perceived stress. 102

Reportedly only 48.3% of U.S. workers were satisfied with their jobs in 2015, down from 61.1% in 1987, according to a study of 5,000 households. 103  But another survey found that employee job satisfaction in 2015 was 88%, up from a low of 77% in 2002. 104  Job satisfaction today is much better, of course, than in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Then Americans were forced to work longer hours and often for the same or less pay, and many struck back by suing employers for violating wage-and-hour laws, as by forcing them to work off the clock or without overtime pay. 105

But what is the relationship between job satisfaction and job performance—does more satisfaction cause better performance or does better performance cause more satisfaction? This is a subject of much debate among management scholars. 106  One comprehensive study found that (1) job satisfaction and performance are moderately related, meaning that employee job satisfaction is a key work attitude managers should consider when trying to increase performance; but (2) the relationship between satisfaction and performance is complex and it seems that both variables influence each other through a host of individual differences and work-environment characteristics. 107

How satisfied are you with the job you are in now, if you have one, or the last job you had? 

SELF-ASSESSMENT 11.4  

How Satisfied Are You with Your Present Job?

The following survey was designed to assess how satisfied you are with your current job, or a previous job, if you’re not presently working. Please be prepared to answer these questions if your instructor has assigned Self-Assessment 11.4 in Connect.

1. What is your level of satisfaction with recognition, compensation, and supervision?

2. If you have low to medium satisfaction with any aspect of the job, identify what can be done to increase your job satisfaction. Be sure to consider what you can do, what your boss might do, or what the organization might do. Be specific.

3. Organizational Commitment: How Much Do You Identify with Your Organization?

Organizational commitment reflects the extent to which an employee identifies with an organization and is committed to its goals. For instance, some managers question whether mothers with children can be fully committed to their jobs, although one survey found that only 4% of more than 2,612 women said that their bosses think that they are not as committed to their jobs because they have children. 108  Research shows a significant positive relationship between organizational commitment and job satisfaction, performance, turnover, and organizational citizenship behavior—discussed in the next section. 109  Thus, if managers are able to increase job satisfaction, employees may show higher levels of commitment, which in turn can elicit higher performance and lower employee turnover. 110

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Important Workplace Behaviors

Why, as a manager, do you need to learn how to manage individual differences? The answer, as you might expect, is so that you can influence employees to do their best work. Among the types of behavior are (1) performance and productivity, (2) absenteeism and turnover, (3) organizational citizenship behaviors, and (4) counterproductive work behaviors.

1. Evaluating Behavior When Employees Are Working: Performance and Productivity

Every job has certain expectations, but in some jobs performance and productivity are easier to define than in others. How many contacts should a telemarketing sales rep make in a day? How many sales should he or she close? Often a job of this nature will have a history of accomplishments (from what previous job holders have attained), so that it is possible to quantify performance behavior.

Thriving employees. Zingerman’s, an Ann Arbor, Michigan, community of food-related businesses, encourages employees to thrive through such devices as sharing information and experimenting with ways to solve problems on their own. Employees with high job satisfaction can help organizations grow.Courtesy of Zingerman’s Community of Businesses

However, an advertising agency account executive handling major clients such as a carmaker or a beverage manufacturer may go months before landing this kind of big account. Or a researcher in a pharmaceutical company may take years to develop a promising new prescription drug.

In short, the method of evaluating performance must match the job being done.

2. Evaluating Behavior When Employees Are Not Working: Absenteeism and Turnover

Should you be suspicious of every instance of absenteeism? Of course, some absences—illness, death in the family, or jury duty, for example—are legitimate. However, a lot of no-show behavior is related to job dissatisfaction. 111  One study of 700 managers found that 20% called in sick simply because they didn’t feel like going to work that day. The top three reasons for employees taking bogus sick days are for doing personal errands, catching up on sleep, and relaxing. 112

Absenteeism may be a precursor to turnover, which, as we saw in  Chapter 9 , is when an employee abandons, resigns, retires, or is terminated from a job. Every organization experiences some turnover, as employees leave for reasons of family, better job prospects, or retirement. However, except in low-skill industries, a continual revolving door of new employees is usually not a good sign, since replacement and training are expensive. 113  For a high-turnover, low-paying job (under $30,000 a year), the Center for American Progress estimates that the costs to replace an employee is 16% of salary; for a mid-range position ($30,000–$50,000 a year), it is 20%; and for a highly educated executive position (such as $100,000 a year), it is 213%.114

Experience demonstrates five practical ways to reduce turnover: (1) Base hiring decisions on the extent to which an applicant’s values fit the organization’s values. (2) Provide post-hiring support, which is referred to as onboarding. As we mentioned in  Chapter 9 , onboarding programs help employees to integrate and transition to new jobs by making them familiar with corporate policies, procedures, culture, and politics by clarifying work-role expectations and responsibilities.115 (3) Focus on enhancing employee engagement. (4) Incorporate realistic job previews (RJPs, discussed in  Chapter 9 ) into the hiring process. (5) Offer employees benefits, such as flexible work hours (discussed in  Chapter 12 ), that meet their needs and values.116

3. Evaluating Behavior That Exceeds Work Roles: Organizational Citizenship Behaviors

Organizational citizenship behaviors are those employee behaviors that are not directly part of employees’ job descriptions—that exceed their work-role requirements. Examples, according to one description, include “such gestures as constructivePage 376 statements about the department, expression of personal interest in the work of others, suggestions for improvement, training new people, respect for the spirit as well as the letter of housekeeping rules, care for organizational property, and punctuality and attendance well beyond standard or enforceable levels.” 117  Research demonstrates a significant and moderately positive correlation between organizational citizenship behaviors and job satisfaction, productivity, efficiency, and customer satisfaction. 118

4. Evaluating Behavior That Harms the Organization: Counterproductive Work Behaviors

The flip side of organizational citizenship behaviors would seem to be what are called  counterproductive work behaviors (CWB), types of behavior that harm employees and the organization as a whole. Such behaviors may include absenteeism and tardiness, drug and alcohol abuse, and disciplinary problems but also extend beyond them to more serious acts such as accidents, sabotage, sexual harassment, violence, theft, and white-collar crime. 119  Some 96% of workers say they have experienced uncivil behavior, and 98% have witnessed it. 120

Clearly, if an employee engages in some kind of CWB, the organization needs to respond quickly and appropriately, defining the specific behaviors that are unacceptable and the requirements for acceptable behavior. 121  It is more desirable, however, to take preventive measures. One way is to screen for CWB during the hiring process. For instance, it’s been found that applicants scoring higher on cognitive ability (intelligence) tests are less likely to be involved in violence and property damage after they are hired. 122  Employees are also less likely to engage in CWB if they have satisfying jobs that offer autonomy or that don’t require them to supervise too many people. 123  ●

EXAMPLE

The Toxic Workplace: “Rudeness is Like the Common Cold”

Incivility. Rudeness. Jerks at work. They’re all forms of CWB, and they’re the bane of the office.

“Nothing is more costly to an organization’s culture than a toxic employee,” says management professor Christine Porath, a researcher in this area. “Rudeness is like the common cold—it’s contagious, spreads quickly, and anyone can be a carrier.”124 Researcher Trevor Foulk concurs. “If someone is rude to me” he says, “it is likely that in my next interaction I will be rude to whomever I am talking to. You respond to their rudeness with your own rudeness.”125

Sapping Energy and Productivity. Difficult coworkers are “de-energizers” who spread their dispiriting attitude to others, says Gretchen Spreitzer, also a management professor (and Porath’s co-author). “They leave you feeling depleted, fatigued, and exhausted.”126 The more one has to interact with a de-energizer, the lower one’s own performance.127

The incivility may be expressed by fellow employees’ snippy remarks, eye-rolling, or chastising of another employee for being late. Toxic bosses may demoralize employees by such actions as “walking away from a conversation because they lose interest; answering calls in the middle of meetings without leaving the room; openly mocking people by pointing out their flaws or personality quirks in front of others,” and similar incivilities, says Porath.128

The Price of Incivility. People who engage in negative and harmful behavior can hurt an organization’s bottom line, say the authors of the study “Toxic Workers.”129 In fact, “avoiding a toxic employee can save a company more than twice as much as bringing on a star performer—specifically, avoiding a toxic worker was worth about $12,500 in turnover costs,” says one writer reporting on the study.130

A paper by Porath and Christine Pearson says the costs of incivility are diminishing creativity, deteriorating performance and team spirit, and fleeing customers. “Employees are less creative when they feel disrespected, and many get fed up and leave,” they write. “About half deliberately decrease their effort or lower the quality of their work. And incivility damages customer relationships.”131

Spotting the Toxic Office. You’ll know you’re working in a toxic office when you see employees “congregate in hush-hush circles around cubicles after meetings to put a negative spin on what just transpired,” says one report. Or when managers withhold information or employees feel it’s not safe to offer their ideas, creativity, or inputs. And you’ll know it’s really time to update your resume when people around you start breaking down and experiencing health issues.132

YOUR CALL

If you were working in a toxic workplace and had to stay there for a while, what would you do to try to make things better?

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11.5

The New Diversified Workforce

MAJOR QUESTION What trends in workplace diversity should managers be aware of?

THE BIG PICTURE

One of today’s most important management challenges is working with stakeholders of all sorts who vary widely in diversity—in age, gender, race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, capabilities, and socioeconomic background. Managers should also be aware of the differences between internal and external dimensions of diversity and barriers to diversity.

Might you hold a few preconceptions that are worth examining? Here’s a reality check:

· Assumption: Illegal immigrants dramatically impact the U.S. economy. No, says the Pew Research Center. Undocumented immigrants represent only about 5.1% of the civilian workforce. 133

· Assumption: Customer bias favoring white men has just about disappeared. Unfortunately not, suggests a study of college students, which found that people give higher ratings for customer satisfaction to white men than to women and members of minorities. 134

· Assumption: Young workers earn less than they used to. Yes, evidently. The wages for young college graduates dropped an average of 2.5% between 2000 and 2015.135

The United States is becoming more diverse in its ethnic, racial, gender, and age makeup—more nonwhite, more single, more working parents, and so on—and the consequences are not always what you would expect.

In the view of Scott E. Page, professor of complex systems, political science, and economics at the University of Michigan, diversity and variety in staffing produce organizational strength. 136  “Diverse groups of people bring to organizations more and different ways of seeing a problem,” he told an interviewer, “and, thus, faster/better ways of solving it. … There’s certainly a lot of evidence that people’s identity groups—ethnic, racial, sexual, age—matter when it comes to diversity in thinking.” 137

Diversity may have its benefits, but it can also be an important management challenge. Let’s consider this.

How to Think about Diversity: Which Differences Are Important?

Diversity represents all the ways people are unlike and alike—the differences and similarities in age, gender, race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, capabilities, and socioeconomic background. Note here that diversity is not synonymous with differences. Rather, it encompasses both differences and similarities. This means that as a manager you need to manage both simultaneously.

To help distinguish the important ways in which people differ, diversity experts Lee Gardenswartz and Anita Rowe have identified a “diversity wheel” consisting of four layers of diversity: (1) personality, (2) internal dimensions, (3) external dimensions, and (4) organizational dimensions. (See  Figure 11.3 , next page.)

FIGURE 11.3  The diversity wheel Four layers of diversity Source: From Diverse Teams at Work by Lee Gardenswartz and Anita Rowe. Copyright 2003, Society for Human Resource Management, Alexandria, VA.

Let’s consider these four layers:

Personality

At the center of the diversity wheel is personality. It is at the center because, as we said in  Section 11.1 , personality is defined as the stable physical and mental characteristics responsible for a person’s identity.

Internal Dimensions

Internal dimensions of diversity  are those human differences that exert a powerful, sustained effect throughout every stage of our lives: gender, age,Page 378 ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, and physical abilities. 138  These are referred to as the primary dimensions of diversity because they are not within our control, for the most part. Yet they strongly influence our attitudes, expectations, and assumptions about other people, which in turn influence our own behavior.

What characterizes internal dimensions of diversity is that they are visible and salient in people. And precisely because these characteristics are so visible, they may be associated with certain stereotypes—for instance, that black people work in menial jobs.

Example: In a 2014 television interview, President Barack Obama recalled how, while waiting outside a restaurant after dinner, he had been handed car keys to fetch a vehicle from valet parking. Michelle Obama recounted while, as First Lady and on a trip to a Target store, she was asked by another shopper to help get something off a high shelf. (She added, “These incidents in the black community, this is the regular course of life.”)139

External Dimensions

External dimensions of diversity include an element of choice; they consist of the personal characteristics that people acquire, discard, or modify throughout their lives: educational background, marital status, parental status, religion, income, geographic location, work experience, recreational habits, appearance, and personal habits. They are referred to as the secondary dimensions of diversity because we have a greater ability to influence or control them than we do internal dimensions.

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These external dimensions also exert a significant influence on our perceptions, behavior, and attitudes. If you are not a believer in the Muslim religion, for example, you may not perceive the importance of some of its practices—as did Abercrombie and Fitch subsidiary Hollister, which told college student Hani Khan that she had to remove her hijab (Islamic headscarf) to work at its San Mateo, California, store, then fired her when she refused. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued the company in 2011 on Khan’s behalf, on the grounds that a headscarf did not affect her job performance. 140

Organizational Dimensions

Organizational dimensions include management status, union affiliation, work location, seniority, work content, and division or department.

Trends in Workforce Diversity

How is the U.S. workforce apt to become more diverse in the 21st century? Let’s examine five categories on the internal dimension—age, gender, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, and physical/mental abilities—and one category on the external dimension, educational level.

Age: More Older People in the Workforce

The most significant demographic event, the late Peter Drucker suggested, “is that in the developed countries the number and proportion of younger people is rapidly shrinking. … Those shrinking numbers of younger people will have to both drive their economies and help support much larger numbers of older people.” 141  Particularly in Europe and Northeast Asia, and to a lesser extent in the United States, an aging population is “a looming economic and social burden,” says a recent Pew Research Center report.142

Because the median age of Americans is currently 37.8 years—the oldest in our history—it seems clear that managers will probably be dealing with an older workforce (indeed, 38% of employees now are older than their boss). 143  Many such employees, whether by choice or by necessity, will continue working.144 At 95 years old, Harriett Clopper, for instance, was still driving herself to work to her job as a greeter at a McDonald’s in Hagerstown, Maryland—something she’d been doing for 20 years. 145

In the United States, workers 55 and older are expected to make up a full one-quarter of the labor force in 2024 (up from 21.7% in 2014). Young workers, those ages 16–24, are projected to decline to 11.3% of the labor force in 2024 (down from 13.7% in 2014). The in-betweeners, those ages 25–54, will probably account for about two-thirds (64%) of the workforce in 2024.146

Diversity enriches. A diverse population in a company can provide ideas, experience, and points of view that strengthen the business culture. What has been your experience, if any, with a diverse workplace?© The Businessman/Alamy RF

Do you have much experience being around older people? How do you feel about the idea of working with them? To find out, try  Self-Assessment 11.5 .

SELF-ASSESSMENT 11.5  

What Are Your Attitudes about Working with Older Employees?

The following survey was designed to assess your attitudes about working with older employees. Please be prepared to answer these questions if your instructor has assigned Self-Assessment 11.5 in Connect.

1. What is the quality of your relationships with older employees? How about your satisfaction with working with older people?

2. How might the quality of relationships with older employees affect your performance and promotability?

3. To what extent might your satisfaction with working with older people impact your performance and promotability?

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Gender: More Women Working

Since the 1960s, women have been flooding into the workplace in great numbers, making up 46.8% of the labor force in 2014 and expected to increase to 47.2% in 2024, whereas men are expected to decline from 53.2% to 52.8% in the same period.147 In addition, more and more businesses are now owned by women—between 2007 and 2016, the number of women-owned firms increased by 45%, compared to just a 9% increase among all businesses.148 Finally, women are gaining some ground in the top rungs of business. In 2016, women held 21 (4.2%) of CEO positions at S&P 500 companies, and the same number (21, or 4.2%) of Fortune 500 companies (up from 15 in 2009, but down from 24 women CEOs in 2014).149

But if pay discrepancies between women and men have improved slightly, as of 2014 (as we noted in  Chapter 9 ) women overall still earned only 79 cents to every $1 for a man, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis, or 83 cents, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.150 Traditionally, women have earned roughly the same pay as men only in jobs paying $25,000–$30,000 a year, but the farther up the pay scale and the higher the education level, the wider the earnings gap. For every dollar a man earns, a woman earns the following: cashier—92 cents; registered nurse—91 cents; administrative assistant—87 cents. For professionals, however, a woman earns proportionately less: psychologist—77 cents; lawyer or judge—75 cents; physician or surgeon—68 cents.151

The obstacles to women’s progress are known as the  glass ceiling—the metaphor for an invisible barrier preventing women and minorities from being promoted to top executive jobs. For instance, in one recent survey of Fortune 500 companies, females accounted for only 14.6% of executive-officer positions. 152

What factors are holding women back? Three that are mentioned are negative stereotypes, lack of mentors, and limited experience in line or general management.153 Among the strategies suggested for fighting gender discrimination: getting more women on boards, increasing the diversity of the applicant pool, evaluating work assignments to ensure they are fairly distributed, making everyone’s salary public, and helping with work/life management.154

Interestingly, however, peers, managers, direct reports, and judges/trained observers rated women executives as more effective than men. Men also rated themselves as more effective than women evaluated themselves.155 Indeed, one study, by Catalyst, an advocacy group for women in business, found that companies with more women executives have better financial performance.156 In  Chapter 9  we mentioned that venture capital firms that invested in women-led companies during the decade 2000–2010 outperformed those that didn’t.157 We discuss women in leadership further in  Chapter 14  and women and communication in  Chapter 15 .

Race and Ethnicity: More People of Color in the Workforce

The non-Hispanic white population is projected to peak in 2024, then to slowly decrease. Whites are projected to change from 77.5% in 2014 to 68.5% in 2060, African Americans from 13.2% to 14.3%, Asians from 5.4% to 9.3%, Hispanics or Latinos from 17.4% to 28.6%, and American Indian/Alaskan Native from 1.2% to 1.5%. 158  We already mentioned that people of color have hit the glass ceiling, with whites holding more of the managerial and professional jobs. In addition, there are two other trends that show that American businesses need to do a lot better by minority populations.

First, minorities tend to earn less than whites. Median household income in 2014 was $35,398 for African Americans and $42,491 for Hispanics. It was $60,256 for non-Hispanic whites. (Asians had the highest median income, at $75,297.) 159

Second, a number of studies have shown that minorities experienced more perceived discrimination, racism-related stress, and less psychological support than whites did. 160

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Sexual Orientation: LGBT People Become More Visible

A May 2015 Gallup survey found that the American public thinks that, on average, 23% of Americans are gay or lesbian—wildly off the mark from the 3.8% of the adult population who self-identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) in another Gallup poll four months earlier.161 Regardless, Americans have become far more tolerant of gay and lesbian behavior, with 63% in 2015 saying they found LGBT relations “morally acceptable” (up from 38% in 2002) and 60% favoring legalized same-sex marriage (up from 35% in 1999).162       

Despite the changing social and legal landscape, however, over half (53%) of LGBT workers nationwide said they hide who they are at work, according to a 2014 report. 163  LGBT workers report higher levels of stress compared with other workers, stress that can be alleviated with LGBT-supportive workplace policies. 164  Finally, gay and bisexual male workers were found to earn 10%–32% less than equally qualified heterosexual counterparts. 165

By now the vocabulary surrounding LGBT issues has changed considerably. For instance,  transgender  is an umbrella term for people whose sense of their gender differs from what is expected based on the sex characteristics with which they are born. 166  That is, these are the estimated 0.03% of Americans who feel their bodies and genders do not match, that the gender label they received at birth does not fit.167 These are people who don’t feel distinctly male or female and who use labels that describe a sense of gender that’s neither “man” nor “woman”—labels such as gender fluid and nonbinary. 

Indeed, with such distinctions, “LGBT” isn’t considered inclusive enough to suit many people today, and the rubric has been expanded to LGBTQ, or even LGBTQQIAP, in which the different letters stand for different things. “Q,” for instance, can stand for “Queer,” but it can also stand for “Questioning.” “I” stands for “Intersex.” “A” can stand for “Ally,” but it can also stand for “Asexual,” characterized by the absence of sexual attraction.168 “P” stands for “Pansexual.” These are not just academic issues, as one can see in the way authorities are having to rethink how men’s and women’s bathrooms and locker rooms should accommodate transgender people.169

How important is the issue of sexual orientation? Once again, if managers are concerned about hiring and keeping workplace talent, they shouldn’t ignore the motivation and productivity of 3.8% of the workforce. Many employers are recognizing this: 88% of Fortune 500 companies include sexual orientation in their nondiscrimination policies, and more than 60% offer domestic partner health benefits for same-sex couples, according to the Human Rights Campaign. 170

No doubt things will change further, since the U.S. Supreme Court made it clear in June 2015 that marriage is no longer solely a legal union between a man and a woman. “The right to marry is a fundamental right inherent in the liberty of the person,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote (in Obergefell v. Hodges) in support of the majority ruling that states may not refuse to marry same-sex couples. “Under the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment couples of the same sex may not be deprived of that right and that liberty.”171

People with Differing Physical and Mental Abilities

About 20% of civilian, noninstitutionalized Americans have a physical or mental disability, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. 172  Since 1992 we have had the  Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which prohibits discrimination against the disabled and requires organizations to reasonably accommodate an individual’s disabilities. 173

Even so, disabled people have difficulty finding work. The Census Bureau found less than half (41.1%) of disabled people ages 21–64 were employed, compared to 79.1% of abled people. 174  Here, too, is a talent pool that managers will no doubt find themselves tapping into in the coming years. (Disability studies, incidentally, has become a hot subject on college campuses.) 175

Disability. Everyone recognizes the wheelchair as signifying that a person is disabled, but other disabilities are not easily identified—and may not invite understanding. Do you think that mental disabilities, for example, should be accommodated in employment? If you were subject to mood swings, would you think that would prevent you from doing your job effectively?© Image Source/PunchStockPage 382

Educational Levels: Mismatches between Education and Workforce Needs

Two important mismatches between education and workplace are these:

· College graduates may be in jobs for which they are overqualified. Almost half a million college graduates are working minimum-wage jobs—260,000 with bachelor’s degrees, 200,000 with associates degrees. 176  In other words, a great many college graduates are  underemployed—working at jobs that require less education than they have–for example, in 2014, 16.3% of all workers who worked in restaurants and bars in the United States had a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to 14.2% in 2000.177

· High-school dropouts and others may not have the literacy skills needed for many jobs. A recent study found that 7% of all people in the United States between the ages of 16 and 24 had dropped out of high school in 2014. 178  Men make up 55% of such dropouts. If, as has been alleged, more than two-thirds of the American workforce reads below ninth-grade level, that is a problem for employers, because about 70% of the on-the-job reading materials are written at or above that level. 179

Barriers to Diversity

Some barriers are erected by diverse people themselves. In the main, however, most barriers are put in their paths by organizations. 180  When we speak of “the organization’s barriers,” we are, of course, referring to the people in the organization—especially those who may have been there for a while—who are resistant to making it more diverse.

Resistance to change in general is an attitude that all managers come up against from time to time, and resistance to diversity is simply one variation. It may be expressed in the following six ways.

1. Stereotypes and Prejudices

Ethnocentrism is the belief that one’s native country, culture, language, abilities, or behavior is superior to those of another culture. (An example was the “Linsanity,” or surprised enthusiasm, expressed by sports fans in 2012 over pro basketball player Jeremy Lin, a Harvard-educated economics graduate of Chinese descent, who defied racial stereotypes by scoring at least 23 points—in one case, 38 points—in his first four games with the New York Knicks. Before Lin, many people assumed that blacks and whites were better basketball players than Asian Americans.) 181  When differences are viewed as being weaknesses—which is what many stereotypes and prejudices ultimately come down to—this may be expressed as a concern that diversity hiring will lead to a sacrifice in competence and quality.

2. Fear of Discrimination against Majority Group Members

Some employees are afraid that attempts to achieve greater diversity in their organization will result in bias against the majority group—that more black or Asian employees will be promoted to fire captain or police lieutenant, for example, over the heads of supposedly more qualified whites.

3. Resistance to Diversity Program Priorities

Some companies, such as PepsiCo, IBM, and Deloitte & Touche, have taken aggressive diversity approaches, such as offering special classes teaching tolerance for diversity and seminars in how to get along. 182  Some employees may see diversity programs as distracting them from the organization’s “real work.” In addition, they may be resentful of diversity-promoting policies that are reinforced through special criteria in the organization’s performance appraisals and reward systems.

4. A Negative Diversity Climate

Diversity climate is a subcomponent of an organization’s overall climate and is defined as the employees’ aggregate “perceptions about thePage 383 organization’s diversity-related formal structure characteristics and informal values.”183 Diversity climate is positive when employees view the organization as being fair to all types of employees, which promotes employee loyalty and overall firm performance.184 It also enhances psychological safety.  Psychological safety  reflects the extent to which people feel free to express their ideas and beliefs without fear of negative consequences.185

5. Lack of Support for Family Demands

In 2015, there were over 34.3 million married couples with children under 18 in the United States. In 60.6% of such families, both parents worked; in 20.8%, only the father worked; and in 5.3%, only the mother worked. 186  But more and more women are moving back and forth between being at-home mothers and in the workforce, as economic circumstances dictate. 187  Yet in a great many households, it is still women who primarily take care of children, as well as other domestic chores. When organizations aren’t supportive in offering flexibility in hours and job responsibilities, these women may find it difficult to work evenings and weekends or to take overnight business trips.

Woman manager. On the job she might be a high-powered manager of scores of people, but at home she may still be expected to be the principal manager of an important few—the children.© Liam Norris/Getty Images RF

6. A Hostile Work Environment for Diverse Employees

Hostile work environments are characterized by sexual, racial, and age harassment and can be in violation of Equal Employment Opportunity law, such as Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.188 Whether perpetrated against women, men, older individuals, or LGBTQ people, hostile environments are demeaning, unethical, and appropriately called “work environment pollution.” A recent example involved former Fox anchor Gretchen Carlson. She filed a complaint saying she was fired because she refused to sleep with Fox News CEO Roger Ailes. Data from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission revealed that almost half of its 30,000 harassment complaints received in 2015 involved sex.189 You certainly won’t get employees’ best work if they believe the work environment is hostile toward them. ●

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11.6

Understanding Stress and Individual Behavior

MAJOR QUESTION What causes workplace stress, and how can it be reduced?

THE BIG PICTURE

Stress is what people feel when enduring extraordinary demands or opportunities and are not sure how to handle them. There are six sources of stress: individual differences, individual task, individual role, group, organizational, and nonwork demands. We describe some consequences of stress and three ways to reduce it in the organization.

Stress is the tension people feel when they are facing or enduring extraordinary demands, constraints, or opportunities and are uncertain about their ability to handle them effectively. 190  Stress is the feeling of tension and pressure; the source of stress is called a  stressor.

A 2015 study by the American Psychological Association found that parents, younger generations, and those living in households making less than $50,000 per year report higher levels of stress than Americans overall, especially when it comes to money. Those who have particularly high stress about money are more likely to say they engage in unhealthy behaviors to manage their stress. 191

There’s no question that work is stressful. The 2015 study found that the top two sources of stress are money (67%) and work (65%). More adults are also reporting “extreme stress,” with 24% saying they were highly stressed in 2015 compared to 18% a year earlier. Commonly cited causes of work stress include low salaries (54%), lack of opportunities for growth or advancement (53%), lack of recognition (53%), and dissatisfaction with their employer’s work–life balance practices (43%).192

The Toll of Workplace Stress

The American Institute of Stress estimates that workplace stress costs the U.S. economy over $300 billion a year in health care, missed work, and stress-reduction treatment. 193  Stress can cause conflicts at work, make you fatigued all the time, and generate problems like insomnia, backaches, headaches, and chest pain. 194

Work stress can also, as you might guess, put managers at risk. Men who suppress anger at work are two to five times more likely to suffer heart attacks or die from heart disease as those who express their “desk rage.” 195  Losing one’s job is, as you might imagine, a very stressful event, being associated with decreased psychological and physical well-being. 196  A Yale study found that layoffs more than doubled the risk of heart attack and stroke among older workers. 197

Workplace stress diminishes positive emotions, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and job performance and increases alcohol and illicit drug use, sleeplessness, overeating, and job turnover. 198  Indeed, historically researchers have generally believed that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between stress and performance. That is, low levels of stress lead to low performance (because people are not “charged up” to perform), but high levels of stress also lead to an energy-sapping fight-or-flight response that produces low performance. Optimal performance, according to this hypothesis, results when people are subjected to moderate levels of stress.

How Does Stress Work?

Stress has both physical and emotional components. Physically, according to Canadian researcher Hans Selye, considered the father of the modern concept of stress, stress is “the nonspecific response of the body to any demand made upon it.” 199  Emotionally, stress has been defined as the feeling of being overwhelmed, “the perception that events or circumstances have challenged, or exceeded, a person’s ability to cope.” 200

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Stressors can be hassles, or simple irritants, such as misplacing or losing things, having concerns about one’s physical appearance, and having too many things to do. Or they can be crises, such as sudden occasions of overwhelming terror—a horrible auto accident, an incident of childhood abuse. Or they can be strong stressors, which can dramatically strain a person’s ability to adapt—extreme physical discomfort, such as chronic severe back pain.

Stressors can be both negative and positive. That is, one can understand that being fired or being divorced can be a great source of stress, but so can being promoted or getting married. As Selye writes, “It is immaterial whether the agent or the situation we face is pleasant or unpleasant; all that counts is the intensity of the demand for adjustment and adaptation.” 201  In addition, Selye distinguished between bad stress (what he called “distress”), in which the result of the stressor can be anxiety and illness, and good stress (“eustress,” pronounced yu stress), which can stimulate a person to better coping and adaptation, such as performing well on a test. 202  In this discussion, however, we are mainly concerned with how stress negatively affects people and their performance.

EXAMPLE

Good Stress: Is Being a Worrywart a Benefit?

Worrying about possible upcoming bad news, such as maybe a dismal grade in a course? That’s stressful, of course. But such worrying can also be beneficial—depending on how you handle it.

Awaiting Important News. A study of law school graduates waiting to hear of high-stakes results (“Did I pass the California bar exam?”) found those who tried coping techniques (exercise, work, binge-watching TV, talking with friends) failed “miserably at suppressing distress,” says a report of the study. But for those who actively worried, when the news arrived, “the worriers were more elated than their relaxed peers, if it was good; if bad, the worriers were better prepared.”203 Of three strategies of waiting—distracting oneself and trying not to freak out, looking for a silver lining to failure, and anticipating the possibility of failure—the third one, called “defensive pessimism,” worked best.204 

Does Worrying Lead to Better Performance? “Constructive worry enables you to develop an adversity plan, in the sense that you’re worrying about all the things that could go wrong and how you’re going to fix them,” says psychologist Gregg Steinberg. “This can prepare you very well for whatever might come”—tough questions in a job interview, for instance, or criticism of your work by your boss.205 It’s important, however, that you not ruminate over things you can’t control.

YOUR CALL

Some jobs are better than others for worrywarts—particularly if they also have a “realistic, detail-focused mindset,” according to one report—among them engineering, computer science, and accounting.206 An actuarial accountant looking for negligence by clients, for instance, will be better motivated by worrying to pay more attention to the evidence—and thus do a better job. How about you? Do you sweat the small stuff? Maybe you should.

The Sources of Job-Related Stress

There are six sources of stress on the job: (1) demands created by individual differences, (2) individual task demands, (3) individual role demands, (4) group demands, (5) organizational demands, and (6) nonwork demands.

1. Demands Created by Individual Differences: The Stress Created by Genetic or Personality Characteristics

Some people are born worriers, those with a gene mutation (known as BDNF) that Yale researchers identify with people who chronically obsess over negative thoughts. 207  Others are impatient, hurried, deadline-ridden, competitive types with the personality characteristic known as  Type A behavior pattern, meaning they are involved in a chronic, determined struggle to accomplish more in less time. 208  Type A behavior has been associated with increased performance in the work of professors, students, and life insurance brokers. 209  However, it also has been associated with greater cardiovascular activity and higher blood pressure, asPage 386 well as to heart disease, especially for individuals who showed strong feelings of anger, hostility, and aggression. 210

Stressful No. 7. Many jobs are stressful, some because people’s lives are at stake (military personnel, firefighters, police officers), some because they are highly deadline-driven (event coordinators, public relations executives). Senior corporate executives ranked No. 7 on CareerCast’s 2014 list of 10 most stressful jobs. If you hate stress, what kind of job should you have?© Comstock/PunchStock RF

2. Individual Task Demands: The Stress Created by the Job Itself

Some occupations are more stressful than others. 211  Being a retail store manager, for instance, can be quite stressful for some people. 212  But being a home-based blogger, paid on a piecework basis to generate news and comment, may mean working long hours to the point of exhaustion.213 Jobs that require “emotional labor”—pretending to be cheerful or smiling all the time, no matter how you feel—can be particularly demanding.214

Low-level jobs can be more stressful than high-level jobs because employees often have less control over their lives and thus have less work satisfaction. Being a barista, day care teacher, hotel concierge, or purchasing agent, which don’t usually pay very well, can be quite stressful. 215

3. Individual Role Demands: The Stress Created by Others’ Expectations of You

Roles  are sets of behaviors that people expect of occupants of a position. Stress may come about because of role overload, role conflict, and role ambiguity.

· Role overload. Role overload occurs when others’ expectations exceed one’s ability. Example: If you as a student are carrying a full course load plus working two-thirds time plus trying to have a social life, you know what role overload is—and what stress is. Similar things happen to managers and workers.

· Role conflict. Role conflict occurs when one feels torn by the different expectations of important people in one’s life. Example: Your supervisor says the company needs you to stay late to meet an important deadline, but your family expects you to be present for your child’s birthday party.

· Role ambiguity. Role ambiguity occurs when others’ expectations are unknown. Example: You find your job description and the criteria for promotion vague, a complaint often voiced by newcomers to an organization.

4. Group Demands: The Stress Created by Coworkers and Managers

Even if you don’t particularly care for the work you do but like the people you work with, that can be a great source of satisfaction and prevent stress. When people don’t get along, that can be a great stressor. Alternatively, even if you have stress under control, a coworker’s stress might bother you, diminishing productivity. 216

In addition, managers can create stress for employees. People who have bad managers are five times more likely to have stress-induced headaches, upset stomachs, and loss of sleep. 217

5. Organizational Demands: The Stress Created by the Environment and Culture

The physical environments of some jobs are great sources of stress: poultry processing, asbestos removal, coal mining, fire fighting, police work, ambulance driving, and so on. Even white-collar work can take place in a stressful environment, with poor lighting, too much noise, improper placement of furniture, and no privacy. 218

An organizational culture that promotes high-pressure work demands on employees will fuel the stress response. 219  The pace of information technology certainly adds to the stress. “For example,” says Michael Patsalos-Fox, chairman of the Americas region for consulting firm McKinsey & Company, “you used to have media companies and you used to have telecom [telecommunications] companies, right? … The problem is that they are encroaching on each other. The onset of a lot of technologies is blurring the boundary between industries that were quite separate, creating opportunities for industries to attack each other.” 220  Such rapidly changing technologies and financial pressures are what keep top executives awake at night.

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6. Nonwork Demands: The Stresses Created by Forces outside the Organization

As anyone knows who has had to cope with money problems, divorce, support of elderly relatives, or other serious nonwork concerns, the stresses outside one’s work life can have a significant effect on work. Even people with ordinary lives can find the stress of coping with family life rugged going.

The Consequences of Stress

Positive stress is constructive and can energize you, increasing your effort, creativity, and performance. Negative stress is destructive, resulting in poorer-quality work, dissatisfaction, errors, absenteeism, and turnover.

De-stressing. Experts say that exercise can be a tremendous stress reliever. Many companies maintain physical-fitness centers not only as an employee perk but also because they realize that exercise helps to improve stamina and endurance while reducing tension.© Ariel Skelley/Blend Images RF

Symptoms of Stress

Negative stress reveals itself in three kinds of symptoms:

· Physiological signs. Lesser physiological signs are sweaty palms, restlessness, backaches, headaches, upset stomach, and nausea. More serious signs are hypertension and heart attacks.

· Psychological signs. Psychological symptoms include forgetfulness, boredom, irritability, nervousness, anger, anxiety, hostility, and depression.221

· Behavioral signs. Behavioral symptoms include sleeplessness, changes in eating habits, and increased smoking/alcohol/drug abuse. Stress may be revealed through reduced performance and job satisfaction.

Burnout

“When you keep investing more energy and the return remains low, that’s when you burn out,” suggests Michael Staver, founder of an executive training company. 222

Burnout is a state of emotional, mental, and even physical exhaustion, expressed as listlessness, indifference, or frustration. The Maslach Burnout Inventory lists 22 elements, including emotional exhaustion, cynicism or depersonalization, and reduced personal efficacy. 223  Clearly, the greatest consequence of negative stress for the organization is reduced productivity. Overstressed employees are apt to call in sick, miss deadlines, take longer lunch breaks, and show indifference to performance. However, some may put in great numbers of hours at work without getting as much accomplished as previously. 224

Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse

Have an employee who’s often late? Who frequently calls in sick on Mondays? Who is somewhat sloppy? Whose memory is slipping? 225  Maybe he or she is afflicted with alcoholism, a chronic, progressive, and potentially fatal disease characterized by a growing compulsion to drink. Alcoholics come from every occupation and social class, from students to college professors to priests to airline pilots. Alcoholism may not interfere with a person’s job in an obvious way until it shows up in absenteeism, accidents, slipshod work, or significant use of a company’s medical benefits. 

As is well known, there is an epidemic of drug abuse and drug overdose deaths across America.226 Alcohol is the most common drug of abuse, but the misuse of others may also affect a person’s productivity—legal drugs, such as tranquilizers or opioids, or illegal drugs such as marijuana, methamphetamine, cocaine, or heroin. 

If you as a manager think you might be dealing with an employee with a substance-abuse problem, it’s suggested you not try to make accusations but firmly point out that productivity is suffering and that it’s up to the subordinate to do something about it. While not doing any counseling yourself, you can try steering the employee to the human resources department, which may have an employee assistance program to help employees overcome personal problems affecting their job performance.

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Incidentally, although many people swear by 12-step programs, such as that offered by Alcoholics Anonymous, an examination of several studies found that such programs were no more and no less successful than any other interventions in reducing alcohol dependence and alcohol-related problems. 227

Reducing Stressors in the Organization

There are all kinds of  buffers, or administrative changes, that managers can make to reduce the stressors that lead to employee burnout. 228  Examples: Extra staff or equipment at peak periods. Increased freedom to make decisions. Recognition for accomplishments. Time off for rest or personal development. Assignment to a new position. Three- to five-day employee retreats at off-site locations for relaxation and team-building activities. Sabbatical leave programs to replenish employees’ energy and desire to work.

Some general organizational strategies for reducing unhealthy stressors are the following: 229

· Roll out employee assistance programs.  Employee assistance programs (EAPs) include a host of programs aimed at helping employees to cope with stress, burnout, substance abuse, health-related problems, family and marital issues, and any general problem that negatively influences job performance. 230

· Recommend a holistic wellness approach. A  holistic wellness program focuses on self-responsibility, nutritional awareness, relaxation techniques, physical fitness, and environmental awareness. This approach goes beyond stress reduction by encouraging employees to try to balance physical, mental, and social well-being by accepting personal responsibility for developing and adhering to a health promotion program. For instance, if you’re too stressed to exercise, you might try some meditation.231 (In India, well-off urban professionals relieve stress by chanting Buddhist mantras.)232 

· Create a supportive environment. Job stress often results because employees work under poor supervision and lack freedom. Wherever possible, it’s better to keep the organizational environment less formal, more personal, and more supportive of employees. Mentors can also help reduce stress.233

· Make jobs interesting. Stress also results when jobs are routinized and boring. It’s better to try to structure jobs so that they allow employees some freedom.

· Make career counseling available. Companies such as IBM make career planning available, which reduces the stress that comes when employees don’t know what their career options are and where they’re headed. ●

Good times—for now. Office stress can certainly lead to “a few drinks after work” becoming a regular pastime—and then almost a necessity, for some people. More than 30% of American adults have abused alcohol or suffered from alcoholism at some point in their lives. Those who get treatment first receive it, on average, at about age 30—eight years after they develop their dependency on drinking. Only 24% of alcoholics, however, receive any treatment at all. Do you find alcohol helps relieve your stress? Are you concerned about it?© Image Source/Getty Images RF

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12.1

Motivating for Performance

MAJOR QUESTION What’s the motivation for studying motivation?

THE BIG PICTURE

Motivation is defined as the psychological processes that arouse and direct people’s goal-directed behavior. The model of how it works is that people have certain needs that motivate them to perform specific behaviors for which they receive rewards, both extrinsic and intrinsic, that feed back and satisfy the original need. The four major perspectives on motivation are content, process, job-design, and reinforcement.

What would make you rise a half hour earlier than usual to ensure you got to work on time—and to perform your best once there? 

Among the possible inducements (such as those offered by SAS, Google, and Salesforce): free snacks and free meals, on-site laundry, Friday afternoons off, child care assistance, freedom to paint your walls, tuition reimbursement, career counseling, and having your dog at work. How about repayment of your student loan—there’s a big one! (But only 3% of companies offer it.)12 How about getting paid to live near your job? (Housing subsidies are sometimes offered to attract new hires to high-rent areas like Silicon Valley.)13

Whether employment rates are high or low, there are always companies, industries, and occupations in which employers feel they need to bend over backward to retain their human capital.

Motivation: What It Is, Why It’s Important

Why do people do the things they do? The answer is this: They are mainly motivated to fulfill their wants and needs.

What Is Motivation and How Does It Work?

Motivation  may be defined as the psychological processes that arouse and direct goal-directed behavior. 14  Motivation is difficult to understand because you can’t actually see it or know it in another person; it must be inferred from one’s behavior. Nevertheless, it’s imperative that you as a manager understand the process of motivation if you are to guide employees in accomplishing your organization’s objectives.

The way motivation works actually is complex, the result of multiple personal and contextual factors. (See  Figure 12.1 .)

FIGURE 12.1  An integrated model of motivation Page 397

The individual personal factors that employees bring to the workplace range from personality to attitudes, many of which we described in  Chapter 11 . The contextual factors include organizational culture, cross-cultural values, the physical environment, and other matters we discuss in this chapter and the next. Both categories of factors influence an employee’s level of motivation and engagement at work.

However, motivation can also be expressed in a simple model—namely, that people have certain needs that motivate them to perform specific behaviors for which they receive rewards that feed back and satisfy the original need. (See  Figure 12.2 , below.)

FIGURE 12.2  A simple model of motivation

For example, as an hourly worker you desire more money (need), which impels you (motivates you) to work more hours (behavior), which provides you with more money (reward) and informs you (feedback loop) that working more hours will fulfill your need for more money in the future.

Rewards (as well as motivation itself) are of two types—extrinsic and intrinsic. 15  Managers can use both to encourage better work performance.

· Extrinsic rewards—satisfaction in the payoff from others. An  extrinsic reward  is the payoff, such as money, a person receives from others for performing a particular task. An extrinsic reward is an external reward; the payoff comes from pleasing others.

Example: The Air Force is offering a bonus to drone pilots if they extend their commitment to remain in the military. These pilots can earn $15,000 a year by extending for either five or nine years, and they have the option to receive half the total bonus up front. The Air Force is doing this because the demand for drone pilots exceeds the supply.16   

Another example: Companies are trying to reduce health care costs by paying employees to lose weight.17 (Some firms are asking their employees to pay higher insurance premiums to spur them to take off pounds, but that has not been found to be a strong enough motivation. “Financial incentives can work well—if they are separated from insurance premiums,” suggests one team of researchers.)18

· Intrinsic rewards—satisfaction in performing the task itself. An  intrinsic reward  is the satisfaction, such as a feeling of accomplishment, a person receives from performing the particular task itself. An intrinsic reward is an internal reward; the payoff comes from pleasing yourself.

Example: When Debbie Feit, a senior copywriter at MARS, a Southfield, Michigan–based marketing agency, was given a month-long paid sabbatical at a charitable organization of her choice, she chose to donate her time writing marketing materials and completing grant applications for children’s mental health organizations. “MARS could have just sent money to the organization,” Feit says, “but instead they also devoted my time to something I felt passionate about. I was very touched by the experience.”19

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We all are motivated by a combination of extrinsic and intrinsic rewards. Which type of reward is more valuable to you? Answering this question can help you generate self-motivation and higher performance. 

SELF-ASSESSMENT 12.1  

Are You More Interested in Extrinsic or Intrinsic Rewards?

The following survey was designed to assess extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. Please be prepared to answer these questions if your instructor has assigned Self-Assessment 12.1 in Connect.

1. What is more important to you, extrinsic or intrinsic rewards? Are you surprised by the results?

2. How can you use the results to increase your motivation to obtain good grades in your classes?

3. If you were managing someone like yourself, what would you do to increase the individual’s motivation?

Why Is Motivation Important?

It seems obvious that organizations would want to motivate their employees to be more productive. But motivation also plays a role in influencing a host of outcomes, including employee engagement, organizational citizenship, absenteeism, and service quality. 20  In order of importance, you as a manager want to motivate people to:

1. Join your organization. You need to instill in talented prospective workers the desire to come to work for you.

2. Stay with your organization. Whether you are in good economic times or bad, you always want to be able to retain good people.

3. Show up for work at your organization. In many organizations, absenteeism and lateness are tremendous problems.

4. Be engaged while at your organization. Engaged employees produce higher-quality work and better customer service.

5. Do extra for your organization. You hope your employees will perform extra tasks above and beyond the call of duty (be organizational “good citizens”).

The Four Major Perspectives on Motivation: Overview

There is no theory accepted by everyone as to what motivates people. In this chapter, therefore, we present the four principal perspectives. From these, you may be able to select what ideas seem most workable to you. The four perspectives on motivation are (1) content, (2) process, (3) job design, and (4) reinforcement, as described in the following four main sections. ●

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12.2

Content Perspectives on Employee Motivation

MAJOR QUESTION What kinds of needs motivate employees?

THE BIG PICTURE

Content perspectives are theories emphasizing the needs that motivate people. Needs are defined as physiological or psychological deficiencies that arouse behavior. The content perspective includes four theories: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, McClelland’s acquired needs theory, Deci and Ryan’s self-determination theory, and Herzberg’s two-factor theory.

Content perspectives, also known as need-based perspectives, are theories that emphasize the needs that motivate people. Content theorists ask, “What kind of needs motivate employees in the workplace?”  Needs  are defined as physiological or psychological deficiencies that arouse behavior. They can be strong or weak, and, because they are influenced by environmental factors, they can vary over time and from place to place.

In addition to McGregor’s Theory X/Theory Y (see  Chapter 2 ), content perspectives include four theories:

· Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory.

· McClelland’s acquired needs theory.

· Deci and Ryan’s self-determination theory.

· Herzberg’s two-factor theory.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Theory: Five Levels

In 1943, one of the first researchers to study motivation, Brandeis University psychology professor Abraham Maslow (mentioned previously in  Chapter 2 ), put forth his  hierarchy of needs theory, which proposes that people are motivated by five levels of needs: (1) physiological, (2) safety, (3) love, (4) esteem, and (5) self-actualization. 21  (See  Figure 12.3 .)

FIGURE 12.3  Maslow’s hierarchy of needs Page 400

The Five Levels of Needs

In proposing this hierarchy of five needs, ranging from basic to highest level, Maslow suggested that needs are never completely satisfied. That is, our actions are aimed at fulfilling the “deprived” needs, the needs that remain unsatisfied at any point in time. Thus, for example, once you have achieved safety (security), which is the second most basic need, you will then seek to fulfill the third most basic need—love (belongingness).

EXAMPLE

The “Chief Emotion Officer”: A Hotel CEO Applies Maslow’s Hierarchy to Employees, Customers, and Investors

Chip Conley is CEO and founder of boutique hotel company Joie de Vivre (JDV), whose mission statement is “creating opportunities to celebrate the joy of life.” In Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow, he describes how JDV used Maslow’s theory to motivate the business’s three key stakeholders—employees, customers, and investors—by tapping into the power of self-actualization to create peak performance. 22

Leaders act as CEOs—“Chief Emotion Officers”—says Conley.23 Drawing on the notion that emotions are just as contagious as the flu virus, Conley believes that you can spread positive emotions in the same way. Thus, for example, every senior management meeting ends with a leader describing someone in the organization who has done outstanding work, and then an executive is dispatched to thank that person.24

Motivating Employees. Applying the Maslow pyramid to employees, says Conley, “the basic need that a job satisfies is money. Toward the middle are needs like recognition for a job well done, and at the top are needs like meaning and creative expression.” 25

Thus, housekeepers, who represent half of a hotel’s workers, would be gathered in small groups and asked what the hotels would look like if they weren’t there each day. Following their answers (unvacuumed carpets, piled-up trash, bathrooms filled with wet towels), they were then asked to come up with alternative names for housekeeping. Some responses: “serenity keepers,” “clutter busters,” “the peace-of-mind police.”

From this exercise, workers developed a sense of how the customer experience would not be the same without them. 26  And that, says Conley, “gets to a sense of meaning in your work that satisfies that high-level human motivation.” Addressing the highest-level need gives employees “a sense that the job helps them become the best people they can be.” 27

Motivating Customers. Many hotels offer clean, safe accommodations. JDV designs each of its 30 hotels to “flatter and vindicate a different category of customers’ distinct self-image,” says Conley. Thus, in San Francisco, the Hotel Rex’s tweedy décor and Jack London touches appeal to urbane literary types. The corridors feature quotes by novelists John Steinbeck and Dashiell Hammett, the bar is called the Vicious Circle (a reference to the famed New York Algonquin literary hangout), and the lobby is stuffed with books and 1920s art.28 The Vitale’s fitness-conscious services and minimalist design target “the kind of bourgeois bohemian who might like Dwell Magazine.” 29

Motivating Investors. Although most investors focus on a “returns-driven relationship” (bottom of the pyramid), some have higher motivations. They are driven not by the deal “but rather [by] an interesting, worthwhile deal,” which JDV attempts to provide. 30

YOUR CALL

Part of the appeal of Maslow’s hierarchy, says social psychologist Douglas Kenrick of Arizona State University, is that the pyramid “captures a complicated idea in a very simple way.”31 Do you agree? How do you think managers at large can use this theory?  

Using the Hierarchy of Needs Theory to Motivate Employees

Research does not clearly support Maslow’s theory, although it remains popular among managers. Still, the importance of Maslow’s contribution is that he showed that workers have needs beyond that of just earning a paycheck. To the extent the organization permits, managers should first try to meet employees’ level 1 and level 2 needs, of course, so that employees won’t be preoccupied with them. Then, however, they need to give employees a chance to fulfill their higher-level needs in ways that also advance the goals of the organization. 32

McClelland’s Acquired Needs Theory: Achievement, Affiliation, and Power

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David McClelland, a well-known psychologist, investigated the needs for affiliation and power and as a consequence proposed the  acquired needs theory, which states that three needs—achievement, affiliation, and power—are major motives determining people’s behavior in the workplace. 33  McClelland believes that we are not born with our needs; rather, we learn them from the culture—from our life experiences.

The Three Needs

Managers are encouraged to recognize three needs in themselves and others and to attempt to create work environments that are responsive to them. The three needs, one of which tends to be dominant in each of us, are as follows. (See  Figure 12.4 , right.)

FIGURE 12.4  McClelland’s three needs

· Need for achievement—“I need to excel at tasks.” This is the desire to excel, to do something better or more efficiently, to solve problems, to achieve excellence in challenging tasks.

· Need for affiliation—“I need close relationships.” This is the desire for friendly and warm relations with other people.

· Need for power—“I need to control others.” This is the desire to be responsible for other people, to influence their behavior or to control them. 34

McClelland identifies two forms of the need for power—personal and institutional.

The negative kind is the need for personal power, as expressed in the desire to dominate others, and involves manipulating people for one’s own gratification.

The positive kind, characteristic of top managers and leaders, is the desire for institutional power, as expressed in the need to solve problems that further organizational goals.

Research tells us that your performance will vary along the lines of the three acquired needs. Where do you think you stand in terms of being motivated by these three needs? You can find out by completing  Self-Assessment 12.2 .

SELF-ASSESSMENT 12.2  

Assessing Your Acquired Needs

The following survey was designed to assess your motivation in terms of acquired needs. Please be prepared to answer these questions if your instructor has assigned Self-Assessment 12.2 in Connect.

1. What is the order of your most important needs? Are you surprised by this result?

2. Given that achievement and power needs are associated with career advancement, how might you increase these two need states?

Using Acquired Needs Theory to Motivate Employees

You can apply acquired needs theory by appealing to the preferences associated with each need when you (1) set goals, (2) provide feedback, (3) assign tasks, and (4) design the job.35 Let’s consider how you can apply this theory.36

Need for Achievement

People motivated by the need for achievement prefer working on challenging, but not impossible, tasks or projects. They like situations in which good performance relies on effort and ability rather than luck, and they like to be rewarded for their efforts. High achievers also want to receive a fair and balanced amount of positive and negative feedback. This enables them to improve their performance.

Need for Power

If you, like most effective managers, have a high need for power, that means you enjoy being in control of people and events and being recognized for this responsibility. Accordingly, your preference would probably be for work that allows you to control or have an effect on people and be publicly recognized for your accomplishments.

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Need for Affiliation

If you tend to seek social approval and satisfying personal relationships, you may have a high need for affiliation. In that case, you may not be the most efficient manager because at times you will have to make decisions that will make people resent you. Instead, you will tend to prefer work, such as sales, that provides for personal relationships and social approval.

Deci and Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory: Competence, Autonomy, and Relatedness

Developed by Edward Deci (pronounced “Dee-see”) and Richard Ryan, psychologists at the University of Rochester,  self-determination theory  assumes that people are driven to try to grow and attain fulfillment, with their behavior and well-being influenced by three innate needs: competence, autonomy, and relatedness. 37

Focus on Intrinsic Motivation

Self-determination theory focuses primarily on intrinsic motivation and rewards (such as feeling independent) rather than on extrinsic motivation and rewards (such as money or fame). Intrinsic motivation is longer lasting than extrinsic motivation and has a more positive impact on task performance. 38

The Three Innate Needs

To achieve psychological growth, according to the theory, people need to satisfy the three innate (that is, inborn) needs of competence, autonomy, and relatedness:

1. Competence—“I want to feel a sense of mastery.” People need to feel qualified, knowledgeable, and capable of completing a goal or task and to learn different skills.

2. Autonomy—“I want to feel independent and able to influence my environment.” People need to feel they have freedom and the discretion to determine what they want to do and how they want to do it.

3. Relatedness—“I want to feel connected to other people.” People need to feel a sense of belonging, of attachment to others.

Using Self-Determination Theory to Motivate Employees

Managers can apply this theory by engaging in leader behavior that fosters the experience of competence, autonomy, and relatedness.39 Following are some specific suggestions:

· Competence. Managers can provide tangible resources, time, contacts, and coaching to improve employee competence, making sure that employees have the knowledge and information they need to perform their jobs. Example: At Hindustan Unilever, senior managers are expected to spend 30% to 40% of their time in grooming people below them. Executives also change roles every two or three years, so they are always learning different aspects of the business.40

· Autonomy. To enhance feelings of autonomy, managers can develop trust with their employees and empower them by delegating meaningful tasks to them. Example: Best Buy’s corporate employees work in a “Results Only Work Environment” (ROWE), which means that no one in the company cares where, when, or how you work, only what you accomplish.41

· Relatedness. Many companies, such as Sacramento-based Nugget Market, use camaraderie to foster relatedness. Example: Reporter Jeremy McCarthy reported being at an Apple Store “when every employee in the store broke into a standing ovation for ten minutes to celebrate the transfer of one of their colleagues to a new store.” He goes on: “For her the ‘relatedness’ score must have been through the roof as they all lined up to give her a hug and cheer her on for her next role.”42  

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Are you feeling motivated in this course? To what extent does the instructor for this course satisfy your needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness? You can find out by taking  Self-Assessment 12.3 .

SELF-ASSESSMENT 12.3  

Assessing Your Needs for Self-Determination

The following survey was designed to assess the extent to which an instructor is satisfying your needs for self-determination. Please be prepared to answer these questions if your instructor has assigned Self-Assessment 12.3 in Connect.

1. Are your needs being met? Do the results make sense in terms of your level of motivation in this course?

2. Based on the results, identify two things you might do to increase your motivation.

3. Based on the results, identify two things your instructor might do to increase your motivation.

Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory: From Dissatisfying Factors to Satisfying Factors

Frederick Herzberg arrived at his needs-based theory as a result of a landmark study of 203 accountants and engineers who were interviewed to determine the factors responsible for job satisfaction and dissatisfaction. 43  Job satisfaction was more frequently associated with achievement, recognition, characteristics of the work, responsibility, and advancement. Job dissatisfaction was more often associated with working conditions, pay and security, company policies, supervisors, and interpersonal relationships. The result was Herzberg’s  two-factor theory, which proposed that work satisfaction and dissatisfaction arise from two different factors—work satisfaction from motivating factors and work dissatisfaction from hygiene factors .

Hygiene Factors versus Motivating Factors

In Herzberg’s theory, the hygiene factors are the lower-level needs, and the motivating factors are the higher-level needs. The two areas are separated by a zone in which employees are neither satisfied nor dissatisfied. (See  Figure 12.5 , next page.)

Page 404FIGURE 12.5  Herzberg’s two-factor theory: satisfaction versus dissatisfaction

· Hygiene factors—“Why are my people dissatisfied?” The lower-level needs,  hygiene factors, are factors associated with job dissatisfaction—such as salary, working conditions, interpersonal relationships, and company policy—all of which affect the job context in which people work.

We believe you can satisfy and motivate people by providing good hygiene factors. The Container Store, regularly rated as one of the top companies to work for by Fortune (No. 27 in 2016), is a good example. The company pays retail hourly salespeople roughly double the industry average, approximately $50,000 a year in 2014.44 Its rate of employee turnover, about 5.7%, is overwhelmingly lower than the industry average of 74.9%.45  

· Motivating factors—“What will make my people satisfied?” The higher-level needs,  motivating factors, or simply motivators, are factors associated with job satisfaction—such as achievement, recognition, responsibility, and advancement—all of which affect the job content or the rewards of work performance. Motivating factors—challenges, opportunities, recognition—must be instituted, Herzberg believed, to spur superior work performance.

An example of a motivating factor would be to give workers more control over their work. When Southwest Airlines decided not to charge passengers for shipping their luggage (though many competitors had long done so), onePage 405 reason was to avoid turning flight attendants into baggage handlers, as passengers tried to stuff more and more carry-on luggage into overhead bins—which would have made the flight attendants unhappy and in turn made passengers unhappy. “We want our employees to feel that their job [is] a calling,” said Southwest CEO Garry Kelly. “And the people who most have to feel that way are the ones closest to the customer.”46

How much do you want? Would a big desk in a big office with a view represent the tangible realization of managerial success for you? Would this be a motivation that would make you feel satisfied?© Baris Simsek/Getty Images RF

Using Two-Factor Theory to Motivate Employees

During the Great Recession, with fewer jobs available, many people felt they were stuck in jobs they disliked—only 39% said they were happy with their positions in 2009, according to a survey by the Conference Board. 47  In 2015, the survey found better results—49.63% of American workers said they were satisfied with their jobs. 48  Another study, however, finds that 88% of U.S. employees report overall satisfaction with their current job, with the important parts being compensation/pay (by 60%), job security (59%), and opportunities to use skills/abilities (also 59%). 49

There will always be some employees who dislike their jobs, but the basic lesson of Herzberg’s research is that you should first eliminate dissatisfaction (hygiene factors), making sure that working conditions, pay levels, and company policies are reasonable. You should then concentrate on spurring motivation by providing opportunities for achievement, recognition, responsibility, and personal growth (motivating factors).

Positive hygiene factors include allowing pets at work; offering video game arcades, fitness classes, and intramural sports (volleyball, soccer); and providing a library of free movies, books, and magazines. 50  If you work at Google, you could also have a college reimbursement plan, legal aid, and travel assistance—and if you die, the company will pay your family half your salary for a decade. 51

The four needs theories are compared below. (See  Figure 12.6 .) Note how acquired needs theory (McClelland) and self-determination theory (Deci and Ryan) focus only on higher-level needs. ●

FIGURE 12.6  A comparison of needs and satisfaction theories: Maslow hierarchy of needs, McClelland acquired needs, Deci and Ryan self-determination, and Herzberg two-factor

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12.3

Process Perspectives on Employee Motivation

MAJOR QUESTION Is a good reward good enough? How do other factors affect motivation?

THE BIG PICTURE

Process perspectives, which are concerned with the thought processes by which people decide how to act, have three viewpoints: equity/justice theory, expectancy theory, and goal-setting theory.

Process perspectives  are concerned with the thought processes by which people decide how to act—how employees choose behavior to meet their needs. Whereas need-based perspectives simply try to understand employee needs, process perspectives go further and try to understand why employees have different needs, what behaviors they select to satisfy them, and how they decide if their choices were successful.

In this section we discuss three process perspectives on motivation:

· Equity/justice theory

· Expectancy theory

· Goal-setting theory

Equity/Justice Theory: How Fairly Do You Think You’re Being Treated in Relation to Others?

Fairness—or, perhaps equally important, the perception of fairness—can be a big issue in organizations. For example, if, as a salesperson for Target, you received a 10% bonus for doubling your sales, would that be enough? What if other Target salespeople received 15%?

Equity theory  is a model of motivation that explains how people strive for fairness and justice in social exchanges or give-and-take relationships. Pioneered by psychologist J. Stacey Adams, equity theory is based on the idea that employees are motivated to see fairness in the rewards they expect for task performance and are motivated to resolve feelings of injustice.52 We will discuss Adams’s ideas and their application, then discuss the extension of equity theory into what is called justice theory. We conclude by discussing how to motivate employees with both equity and justice theory.

Equity theory is based on cognitive dissonance (see  Chapter 11 ), the psychological discomfort people experience between their cognitive attitude and incompatible behavior—a discomfort that, it’s suggested, motivates them to take action to maintain consistency between their beliefs and their behavior. Accordingly, when we are victimized by unfair social exchanges (“I was way overcharged for that car repair!”), our resulting cognitive dissonance prompts us to correct the situation—whether it’s slightly changing our attitude or behavior (“That shop is going to get my worst rating on Yelp”) or, at the extreme, committing sabotage or workplace violence.

Example: The typical American believes a CEO earns $1 million in annual pay, whereas the actual median compensation is about $10.3 million. Regardless, most Americans (74%) believe that CEOs are paid too much relative to the average worker.53 How, then, might employees respond to knowing that the average pay for CEOs in 2015 was about 210 times the average worker’s pay, up from 181 times in 2009?54 Some experts suggest that such imbalances are partly responsible for the $600 billion that is stolen annually in U.S. workplaces, or roughly $4,500 per employee.55

The Elements of Equity Theory: Comparing Your Inputs and Outputs with Those of Others

The key elements in equity theory are inputs, outputs (rewards), and comparisons. (See  Figure 12.7 , opposite page.)

Page 407FIGURE 12.7  Equity theory How people perceive they are being fairly or unfairly rewarded.

· Inputs—“What do you think you’re putting into the job?” The inputs that people perceive they give to an organization are their time, effort, training, experience, intelligence, creativity, seniority, status, and so on.

· Outputs or rewards—“What do you think you’re getting out of the job?” The outputs are the rewards that people receive from an organization: pay, benefits, praise, recognition, bonuses, promotions, status perquisites (corner office with a view, say, or private parking space), and so on.

· Comparison—“How do you think your ratio of inputs and rewards compares with those of others?” Equity theory suggests that people compare the ratio of their own outcomes to inputs against the ratio of someone else’s outcomes to inputs. When employees compare the ratio of their inputs and outputs (rewards) with those of others—whether coworkers within the organization or even other people in similar jobs outside it—they then make a judgment about fairness. Either they perceive there is equity, and so they are satisfied with the ratio and don’t change their behavior, or they perceive there is inequity, and so they feel resentful and act to change the inequity. 56

Using Equity Theory to Motivate Employees

Adams suggests that employees who feel they are being underrewarded will respond to the perceived inequity in one or more negative ways, as by reducing their inputs (“I’m just going to do the minimum required”), trying to change the outputs or rewards they receive (“If they won’t give me a raise, I’ll just take stuff”), distorting the inequity (“They’ve never paid me what I’m worth”), changing the object of comparison (“They think I don’t work as hard as Bob? He’s a slacker compared to Sid”), or leaving the situation (“I’m outta here!”). By contrast, employees who think they are treated fairly are more likely to support organizational change, more apt to cooperate in group settings, and less apt to turn to arbitration and the courts to remedy real or imagined wrongs.

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The Elements of Justice Theory: Distributive, Procedural, and Interactional 

Beginning in the later 1970s, researchers in equity theory began to expand into an area called organizational justice, which is concerned with the extent to which people perceive they are treated fairly at work. Three different components of organizational justice have been identified: distributive, procedural, and interactional. 57

· Distributive justice—“How fairly are rewards being given out?” Distributive justice reflects the perceived fairness of how resources and rewards are distributed or allocated.

· Procedural justice—“How fair is the process for handing out rewards?” Procedural justice  is defined as the perceived fairness of the process and procedures used to make allocation decisions.

· Interactional justice—“How fairly am I being treated when rewards are given out?” Interactional justice  relates to the “quality of the interpersonal treatment people receive when procedures are implemented,” in one definition.58 This form of justice is not about how decision making or procedures are perceived but rather with whether people themselves believe they are being treated fairly when decisions are implemented. Fair interpersonal treatment necessitates that managers communicate truthfully and treat people with courtesy and respect.

SELF-ASSESSMENT 12.4  

Measuring Perceived Fair Interpersonal Treatment

The following survey was designed to assess the extent to which you are experiencing fair interpersonal treatment at work. Please be prepared to answer these questions if your instructor has assigned Self-Assessment 12.4 in Connect.

1. Are you being treated equitably?

2. Based on examining the three lowest scoring items, what could your manager do to improve your perceptions of equity?

3. What can you do to increase your perceptions of fair interpersonal treatment? 

Using Equity and Justice Theories to Motivate Employees

Employees often may feel quite strongly about what they perceive to be an inequitable or unjust work situation. Often the source of their frustration is pay; one Gallup poll revealed that 51% of Americans felt they were underpaid.59

Your knowledge of equity and justice theories will allow you to hear out and better understand employee concerns. As an employee yourself, you can motivate other workers by clearly understanding and communicating their opportunities to improve their situations. You can communicate reasonable expectations and make sure objective measures for rewards are well understood.

Five practical lessons can be drawn from equity and justice theories, as follows.

1. Employee Perceptions Are What Count

No matter how fair management thinks the organization’s policies, procedures, and reward system are, each employee’s perception of the equity of those factors is what counts.

Example: Financial services corporation Morgan Stanley decided to pay 2012 bonuses in four equal installments, starting in May 2013 and going through January 2016. “Employees who quit or are laid off before the payments,” reported The Wall Street Journal, “stand to lose their deferred compensation unless they negotiate a separate deal with the company.”60 Executives at the company think that this is a good way to reduce risky behavior. Employees, however, think it is unfair. What do you think?

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2. Employees Want a Voice in Decisions That Affect Them

Managers benefit by allowing employees to participate in making decisions about important work outcomes. In general, employees’ perceptions of procedural justice are enhanced when they have a voice in the decision-making process.  Voice is defined as “employees’ upward expression of challenging but constructive opinions, concerns, or ideas on work-related issues to their managers.” 61

Managers are encouraged to seek employee input on organizational changes that are likely to affect the workforce, but many managers are reluctant to follow this recommendation, according to a recent study. Moreover, employees were evaluated more negatively when they engaged in challenging forms of voice. Managers also were less likely to use these employees’ ideas.62 The lesson here: Be careful when you challenge your boss’s decisions.

3. Employees Should Be Given an Appeals Process

Employees who are given the opportunity to appeal decisions that affect their welfare enhance the perceptions of distributive and procedural justice.

4. Leader Behavior Matters

Employees’ perceptions of justice are strongly influenced by the leadership behavior exhibited by their managers (leadership is discussed in  Chapter 14 ). Thus, it is important for managers to consider the justice-related implications of their decisions, actions, and public communications.

Example: Employees at Honeywell, a multinational conglomerate, felt better about being asked to take furloughs—unpaid leave, while remaining employed—when they learned that their CEO and chairman, David Cole, did not take his $4 million bonus during the time employees were furloughed.63

5. A Climate for Justice Makes a Difference

Managers need to pay attention to the organization’s climate for justice. For example, an aggregation of 38 research studies demonstrated that an organization’s climate for justice was significantly related to team performance.64 Researchers also believe a climate of justice can significantly influence the type of customer service provided by employees. In turn, this level of service is likely to influence customers’ perceptions of “fair service” and their subsequent loyalty and satisfaction.

The discussion of equity/justice theory has important implications for your own career. For example, you could work to resolve negative inequity by asking for a raise or a promotion (raising your outputs) or by working fewer hours or exerting less effort (reducing inputs). You could also resolve the inequity cognitively, by adjusting your perceptions as to the value of your salary or other benefits (outcomes) or the value of the actual work done by you or your coworkers (inputs).

Expectancy Theory: How Much Do You Want and How Likely Are You to Get It?

Introduced by Victor Vroom,  expectancy theory  suggests that people are motivated by two things: (1) how much they want something and (2) how likely they think they are to get it. 65  In other words, assuming they have choices, people will make the choice that promises them the greatest reward if they think they can get it.

The Three Elements: Expectancy, Instrumentality, and Valence

What determines how willing you (or an employee) are to work hard at tasks important to the success of the organization? The answer, says Vroom, is that you will do what you can do when you want to.

Your motivation, according to expectancy theory, involves the relationship between your effort, your performance, and the desirability of the outcomes (such as pay or recognition) of your performance. These relationships, which are shown in the following drawing, are affected by the three elements of expectancy, instrumentality, and valence. (See  Figure 12.8 .)

Page 410FIGURE 12.8  Expectancy theory: the major elements

1. Expectancy—“Will I Be Able to Perform at the Desired Level on a Task?”

Expectancy  is the belief that a particular level of effort will lead to a particular level of performance. This is called the effort-to-performance expectancy.

Example: If you believe that putting in more hours working at Target selling clothes will result in higher sales, then you have high effort-to-performance expectancy. That is, you believe that your efforts will matter. You think you have the ability, the product knowledge, and so on so that putting in extra hours of selling can probably raise your sales of clothes.

2. Instrumentality—“What Outcome Will I Receive If I Perform at This Level?”

Instrumentality  is the expectation that successful performance of the task will lead to the outcome desired. This is called the performance-to-reward expectancy.

Example: If you believe that making higher sales will cause Target to give you a bonus, then you have high performance-to-reward expectancy. You believe that, if you can achieve your goals, the outcome will be worthwhile. This element is independent of the previous one—you might decide you don’t have the ability to make the extra sales, but if you did, you’d be rewarded. (For instance, lately, because of the public’s concern about the quality of the educational system in the United States, school boards and politicians are implementing programs that tie teachers’ pay to student performance.) 66

3. Valence—“How Much Do I Want the Outcome?”

Valence  is value, the importance a worker assigns to the possible outcome or reward.

Example: If you assign a lot of importance or a high value to Target’s prospective bonus or pay raise, then your valence is said to be high.

For your motivation to be high, you must be high on all three elements—expectancy, instrumentality, and valence. If any element is low, your motivation goes down. Your effort-to-performance expectancy might be low, for instance, because you doubt making an effort will make a difference (because retail clothing selling has too much competition). Or your performance-to-reward expectancy might be low because you don’t think Target is going to give you a bonus for being a star at selling. Or your valence might be low because you don’t think the bonus or raise is going to be high enough to justify working evenings and weekends.

Using Expectancy Theory to Motivate Employees

The principal problem with expectancy theory is that it is complex. Even so, the underlying logic is understandable, and research seems to show that many managers are not following its principles. 67

When attempting to motivate employees, managers should ask the following questions:

· What rewards do your employees value? As a manager, you need to get to know your employees and determine what rewards (outcomes) they value, such as pay raises or recognition.

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What are the job objectives and the performance level you desire? You need to clearly define the performance objectives and determine what performance level or behavior you want so that you can tell your employees what they need to do to attain the rewards.

· Are the rewards linked to performance? You want to reward high performance, of course. Thus, employees must be aware that X level of performance within Y period of time will result in Z kinds of rewards. In a team context, however, research shows that it is best to use a combination of individual and team-based rewards. 68

· Do employees believe you will deliver the right rewards for the right performance? Your credibility is on the line here. Your employees must believe that you have the power, the ability, and the will to give them the rewards you promise for the performance you are requesting.

EXAMPLE

Reducing the F’s: Applying Expectancy Theory to Failing Students

“A highly skilled CEO is hard to find,” observes a business writer. “Highly paid CEOs, however, are everywhere you look.” 69

Indeed, the mass media are full of stories about top managers who don’t produce results but are still rewarded (such as the Staples executives who didn’t make their 2013 goals but received a special bonus anyway—“for effort”). 70  Where’s the inducement to deliver superior performance when you’re going to be rewarded anyway? 71

Maybe we can learn from high school.

Fewer F’s. As a principal in Arizona high schools, Dr. Tim Richard has used a motivational program called Celebration/Remediation to improve the grades of students. For instance, at 3,000-student Westwood High School in Mesa, which had 1,200 failing pupils, the number of students with F grades dropped to 900 within the first few months. At Poston Butte High School, the number of students with one or more F’s was reduced from 555 to 262 in nine weeks. “Once we changed the culture by bringing on Celebration/Remediation … ,” Richard said, “the kids have completely embraced it.” 72  (Poston Butte also rewards students who pass all their classes with an early release from school.)

Celebration or Remediation? At Westwood, the program works like this: “Students are allowed to go outside and have fun with their friends for 28 minutes on four mornings a week,” Richard told The Arizona Republic. “But those who have even one F must stay inside for ‘remediation’—28 minutes of extra study, help from peer tutors, or meetings with teachers.” 73

Richard believes the key to motivating students is to link a highly valued reward—socializing with friends outside—with grades. Socializing includes not only hanging out but also eating snacks, playing organized games, and listening and dancing to music. “You really appreciate celebration after you have been in remediation,” said Ivana Baltazar, a 17-year-old senior who raised her grade in economics from an F to a B after receiving help through the program.

YOUR CALL

The tricky part, observes Westwood student tutor Joseph Leung, is addressing expectancy—“getting people out of the mindset that they can’t succeed. … A lot of times they just haven’t done their homework. I try to help them understand that the difference between a person passing and failing is their work ethic.” For top executives in business, expectancy doesn’t seem to be a problem; rather, it’s instrumentality and valence. How could you apply Richard’s program to reward performance in business?

Goal-Setting Theory: Objectives Should Be Specific and Challenging but Achievable

We have been considering the importance of goal setting since first introducing the topic in  Chapter 5 .  Goal-setting theory  suggests that employees can be motivated by goals that are specific and challenging but achievable. According to psychologists Edwin Locke and Gary Latham, who developed the theory, it is natural for people to set and strive for goals; however, the goal-setting process is useful only if people understand and accept the goals.

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The Four Motivational Mechanisms of Goal-Setting Theory

Goal setting helps motivate you by doing the following:

1. It Directs Your Attention

Goal setting directs your attention toward goal-relevant tasks and away from irrelevant ones.

2. It Regulates the Effort Expended

The effort you expend is generally proportional to the goal’s difficulty.

3. It Increases Your Persistence

Goal setting makes obstacles become challenges to be overcome, not reasons to fail.

4. It Fosters Use of Strategies and Action Plans

The use of strategies and action plans make it more likely that you will realize success.

Some Practical Results of Goal-Setting Theory

A goal is defined as an objective that a person is trying to accomplish through his or her efforts. Goal-setting experts Locke and Latham proposed the following recommendations when implementing a goal-setting program.74 To result in high motivation and performance, according to recent research, goals must have a number of characteristics, as follows.

1. Goals Should Be Specific

Goals that are specific and difficult lead to higher performance than general goals like “Do your best” or “Improve performance.” This is why it is essential to set specific, challenging goals. Goals such as “Sell as many cars as you can” or “Be nicer to customers” are too vague. Instead, goals need to be specific—usually meaning quantitative, as in “Boost your revenues 25%” and “Cut absenteeism by 10%.” 75

2. Certain Conditions Are Necessary for Goal Setting to Work

People must have the ability and resources needed to achieve the goal, and they need to be committed to the goal.

3. Goals Should Be Linked to Action Plans

An action plan outlines the activities or tasks that need to be accomplished in order to obtain a goal and reminds us of what we should be working on. Both individuals (such as college students) and organizations are more likely to achieve their goals when they develop detailed action plans. 76

Example: Teams of employees at Tornier, a medical device manufacturer in Amsterdam, meet every 45, 60, or 90 days to create action plans for completing their goals. Implementation of the plans can take between 6 and 18 months, depending on the complexity of the goal.77

4. Performance Feedback and Participation in Deciding How to Achieve Goals Are Necessary but Not Sufficient for Goal Setting to Work

Feedback and participation enhance performance only when they lead employees to set and commit to a specific, difficult goal.

Example: Take Jim’s Formal Wear, a tuxedo wholesaler in Illinois. “Once a week,” says one report, “employees meet with their teams to discuss their efforts and what changes should be made the next week. Employees frequently suggest ways to improve efficiency or save money, such as reusing shipping boxes and hangers.”78 Goals lead to higher performance when you use feedback and participation to stay focused and committed to a specific goal. Some of the preceding recommendations are embodied in the advice we presented in  Chapter 5 —namely, that goals should be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Results-oriented, and having Target dates.

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12.4

Job Design Perspectives on Motivation

MAJOR QUESTION What’s the best way to design jobs—adapt people to work or work to people?

THE BIG PICTURE

Job design, the division of an organization’s work among employees, applies motivational theories to jobs to increase performance and satisfaction. The traditional approach to job design is to fit people to the jobs; the modern way is to fit the jobs to the people, using job enrichment and approaches that are based on Herzberg’s landmark two-factor theory, discussed earlier in this chapter. The job characteristics model offers five job attributes for better work outcomes.

About half of workers reported in a recent year that their current job was stagnant. 79  Is there anything that can be done about this?

Job design  is (1) the division of an organization’s work among its employees and (2) the application of motivational theories to jobs to increase satisfaction and performance. There are two different approaches to job design—one traditional, one modern—that can be taken in deciding how to design jobs. The traditional way is fitting people to jobs; the modern way is fitting jobs to people. 80

Fitting People to Jobs

Fitting people to jobs is based on the assumption that people will gradually adapt to any work situation. Even so, jobs must still be tailored so that nearly anyone can do them. This is the approach often taken with assembly-line jobs and jobs involving routine tasks. For managers the main challenge becomes “How can we make the worker most compatible with the work?”

One technique is  scientific management, the process of reducing the number of tasks a worker performs. When a job is stripped down to its simplest elements, it enables a worker to focus on doing more of the same task, thus increasing employee efficiency and productivity. This may be especially useful, for instance, in designing jobs for mentally disadvantaged workers, such as those jobs run by Goodwill Industries. However, research shows that simplified, repetitive jobs lead to job dissatisfaction, poor mental health, and a low sense of accomplishment and personal growth. 81

Fitting Jobs to People

Fitting jobs to people is based on the assumption that people are underutilized at work and that they want more variety, challenges, and responsibility. This philosophy, an outgrowth of Herzberg’s theory, is one of the reasons for the popularity of work teams in the United States. The main challenge for managers is “How can we make the work most compatible with the worker so as to produce both high performance and high job satisfaction?”

Two techniques for this type of job design are (1) job enlargement and (2) job enrichment.

Job Enlargement: Putting More Variety into a Job

The opposite of scientific management,  job enlargement  consists of increasing the number of tasks in a job to increase variety and motivation. For instance, the job of installing flat screens in television sets could be enlarged to include installation of the circuit boards as well.

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Although proponents claim job enlargement can improve employee satisfaction, motivation, and quality of production, research suggests job enlargement by itself won’t have a significant and lasting positive effect on job performance. After all, working at two boring tasks instead of one doesn’t add up to a challenging job. Instead, job enlargement is just one tool of many that should be considered in job design. 82

Job Enrichment: Putting More Responsibility and Other Motivating Factors into a Job

Job enrichment is the practical application of Frederick Herzberg’s two-factor motivator-hygiene theory of job satisfaction. 83  Specifically,  job enrichment  consists of building into a job such motivating factors as responsibility, achievement, recognition, stimulating work, and advancement.

However, instead of the job-enlargement technique of simply giving employees additional tasks of similar difficulty (known as horizontal loading), with job enrichment employees are given more responsibility (known as vertical loading).

Intuit, for example, encourages employees “to spend 10% of their working time on projects and ideas of their own, even if they are not related to their assignments.” The company has found that this practice has led to the creation of several successful new products.84

The Job Characteristics Model: Five Job Attributes for Better Work Outcomes

Developed by researchers J. Richard Hackman and Greg Oldham, the job characteristics model of design is an outgrowth of job enrichment. 85  The  job characteristics model  consists of (a) five core job characteristics that affect (b) three critical psychological states of an employee that in turn affect (c) work outcomes—the employee’s motivation, performance, and satisfaction. The model is illustrated below. (See  Figure 12.9 .)

FIGURE 12.9  The job characteristics model Source: From J. Richard Hackman and Greg R. Oldham, Work Redesign, le ©1980. Reproduced by permission of Pearson Education, Inc., Upper Saddle River, New Jersey. Page 415

Five Job Characteristics

The five core job characteristics are skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and feedback, as follows.

1. Skill Variety—“How Many Different Skills Does Your Job Require?”

Skill variety describes the extent to which a job requires a person to use a wide range of different skills and abilities.

Example: The skill variety required by an executive chef is higher than that for a coffeehouse barista.

Skill variety. Being a symphony conductor—or an airline pilot, a building contractor, a physician, or a watch maker—requires a greater number of skills than, say, driving a truck. Do highly skilled employees typically make good managers? What skills do airline pilots have that would make them effective managers in other kinds of work?© Alenavlad/Shutterstock RF

2. Task Identity—“How Many Different Tasks Are Required to Complete the Work?”

Task identity describes the extent to which a job requires a worker to perform all the tasks needed to complete the job from beginning to end.

Example: The task identity for a craftsperson who goes through all the steps to build a stained-glass church window is higher than it is for an assembly-line worker who installs just the windshields on cars.

3. Task Significance—“How Many Other People Are Affected by Your Job?”

Task significance describes the extent to which a job affects the lives of other people, whether inside or outside the organization.

Example: A technician who is responsible for keeping a hospital’s electronic equipment in working order has higher task significance than a person wiping down cars in a carwash.

4. Autonomy—“How Much Discretion Does Your Job Give You?”

Autonomy describes the extent to which a job allows an employee to make choices about scheduling different tasks and deciding how to perform them.

Example: College-textbook salespeople have lots of leeway in planning which campuses and professors to call on. Thus, they have higher autonomy than do toll-takers on a bridge, whose actions are determined by the flow of vehicles.

5. Feedback—“How Much Do You Find Out How Well You’re Doing?”

Feedback describes the extent to which workers receive clear, direct information about how well they are performing the job.

Example: Professional basketball players receive immediate feedback on how many of their shots are going into the basket. Engineers working on new weapons systems may go years before learning how effective their performance has been.

How the Model Works

According to the job characteristics model, these five core characteristics affect a worker’s motivation because they affect three criticalPage 416 psychological states: meaningfulness of work, responsibility for results, and knowledge of results. (Refer to  Figure 12.9  again.) In turn, these positive psychological states fuel high motivation, high performance, high satisfaction, and low absenteeism and turnover.

One other element—shown at the bottom of  Figure 12.9 —needs to be discussed: contingency factors. This refers to the degree to which a person wants personal and psychological development. Job design works when employees are motivated; to be so, they must have three attributes: (1) necessary knowledge and skill, (2) desire for personal growth, and (3) context satisfactions—that is, the right physical working conditions, pay, and supervision.

Job design works. But keep in mind that it is not for everyone. It is more likely to work when people have the required knowledge and skills, when they want to develop, and when they are satisfied with their jobs.

Applying the Job Characteristics Model

There are three major steps to follow when applying the model.

· Diagnose the work environment to see whether a problem exists. Hackman and Oldham developed a self-report instrument for managers to use called the job diagnostic survey. This will indicate whether an individual’s so-called motivating potential score (MPS)—the amount of internal work motivation associated with a specific job—is high or low.

· Determine whether job redesign is appropriate. If a person’s MPS is low, an attempt should be made to determine which of the core job characteristics is causing the problem. You should next decide whether job redesign is appropriate for a given group of employees. Job design is most likely to work in a participative environment in which employees have the necessary knowledge and skills.

· Consider how to redesign the job. Here you try to increase those core job characteristics that are lower than national norms.

Example: Employers want to save on health costs by helping employees with diabetes, heart disease, and similar chronic conditions avoid emergency room visits and hospital admissions. 86  However, since primary care doctors, who could help patients manage their conditions (as by reminding diabetics to monitor their blood-glucose levels daily), are paid less than physicians in other specialties, the system has turned such doctors “into little chipmunks on a wheel, pumping out patients every five minutes,” as one observer described it. 87

The proposed solution? Redesign the job by rewarding primary care doctors for spending more time with patients.88 (Some perils to avoid: complex compensation designs, poor alignment of goals, and lack of defined, actionable measures, all of which can lead to unintended consequences and failure.)89

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12.5

Reinforcement Perspectives on Motivation

MAJOR QUESTION What are the types of incentives I might use to influence employee behavior?

THE BIG PICTURE

Reinforcement theory suggests behavior will be repeated if it has positive consequences and won’t be if it has negative consequences. There are four types of reinforcement: positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, extinction, and punishment. This section also describes how to use some reinforcement techniques to modify employee behavior.

Reinforcement evades the issue of people’s needs and thinking processes in relation to motivation, as we described under the need-based and process perspectives. Instead, the reinforcement perspective, which was pioneered by Edward L. Thorndike and B. F. Skinner, is concerned with how the consequences of a certain behavior affect that behavior in the future. 90

Skinner was the father of operant conditioning, the process of controlling behavior by manipulating its consequences. Operant conditioning rests on Thorndike’s  law of effect,  which says behavior with favorable consequences tends to be repeated, while behavior with unfavorable consequences tends to disappear. 91

From these underpinnings has come  reinforcement theory , which attempts to explain behavior change by suggesting that behavior with positive consequences tends to be repeated, whereas behavior with negative consequences tends not to be repeated. The use of reinforcement theory to change human behavior is called behavior modification.

The Four Types of Reinforcement: Positive, Negative, Extinction, and Punishment

Reinforcement  is anything that causes a given behavior to be repeated or inhibited, whether praising a child for cleaning his or her room or scolding a child for leaving a tricycle in the driveway.

There are four types of reinforcement: (1) positive reinforcement, (2) negative reinforcement, (3) extinction, and (4) punishment. (See  Figure 12.10 , next page.)

FIGURE 12.10  Four types of reinforcement These are different ways of changing employee behavior.

Positive Reinforcement: Strengthens Behavior

Positive reinforcement  is the use of positive consequences to strengthen a particular behavior.

Example: A supervisor who has asked an insurance salesperson to sell more policies might reward successful performance by saying, “It’s great that you exceeded your sales quota, and you’ll get a bonus for it. Maybe next time you’ll sell even more and will become a member of the Circle of 100 Top Sellers and win a trip to Paris as well.” Note the rewards: praise, more money, recognition, awards. Presumably this will strengthen the behavior and the sales rep will work even harder in the coming months.

Negative Reinforcement: Also Strengthens Behavior

Negative reinforcement  is the process of strengthening a behavior by withdrawing something negative.

Example: A supervisor who has been nagging a salesperson might say, “Well, so you exceeded your quota” and stop the nagging. Note the neutral statement; there is no praise but also no longer any negative statements. This could cause the sales rep to maintain his or her existing behavior.

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Extinction: Weakens Behavior

Extinction  is the weakening of behavior by ignoring it or making sure it is not reinforced.

Example: A supervisor might tell a successful salesperson, “I know you exceeded your sales-goal quota, but now that our company has been taken over by another firm, we’re not giving out bonuses anymore.” Presumably this will weaken the salesperson’s efforts to perform better in the future.

Punishment: Also Weakens Behavior

Punishment  is the process of weakening behavior by presenting something negative or withdrawing something positive.

Example: The U.S. Department of Transportation now fines airlines up to $27,500 per passenger for planes left on the tarmac for more than three hours. This policy reduced reported cases from 535 to 12 in the first year it was implemented.92

EXAMPLE

Reinforcement: How Do You Tie CEO Pay to Performance?

Earlier we mentioned the problem of CEOs who don’t produce results but are still rewarded with special bonuses anyway. However, some boards of directors are now trying to tie CEO compensation to actual performance. Consider the following.

Better Food Safety? In 2016, Chipotle Mexican Grill, which had suffered from a series of illness outbreaks thought to originate in its restaurants’ food-safety practices, decided to tie the future compensation of its executives directly to the company’s share price performance.93Page 419 However, some critics question whether this is a fair arrangement, saying that it might be better to base compensation on improvements in food safety rather than on stock price alone.94

Realizing Environmental Goals? At Intel and other companies, executive compensation is being tied to corporate sustainability goals, including reduction in energy costs and consumption. “Sustainability has slowly moved into the realm of finance and corporate oversight,” says a Forbes writer, “as energy, carbon emissions, water, and waste have become financial assets in terms of reduced cost, risk mitigation, and new lines of revenue.”95 However, not everyone is convinced tying CEO pay to sustainability is a slam dunk. For publicly traded companies that live and die by their quarterly earnings, this kind of long-term plan “is a tough nut to crack,” says one experienced observer.96

YOUR CALL

You can understand how increasing executive compensation can easily be based on performance—if the only indicator of performance is the company’s higher stock price. But what if what is really wanted is something other than money, such as food safety or better environmental practices? One study, in fact, found a link between lavish stock option grants to executives and serious product recalls.97 What’s missing, in your opinion? (To get some clarity, read on.)

Using Reinforcement to Motivate Employees

The following are some guidelines for using two types of reinforcement—positive reinforcement and punishment.

Positive Reinforcement

There are several aspects of positive reinforcement, which should definitely be part of your toolkit of managerial skills:

· Reward only desirable behavior. You should give rewards to your employees only when they show desirable behavior. Thus, for example, you should give praise to employees not for showing up for work on time (an expected part of any job) but for showing up early.

· Give rewards as soon as possible. You should give a reward as soon as possible after the desirable behavior appears. Thus, you should give praise to an early-arriving employee as soon as he or she arrives, not later in the week.

· Be clear about what behavior is desired. Clear communication is everything. You should tell employees exactly what kinds of work behaviors are desirable, and you should tell everyone exactly what he or she must do to earn rewards.

· Have different rewards and recognize individual differences. Recognizing that different people respond to different kinds of rewards, you should have different rewards available. Thus, you might give a word of praise verbally to one person, text or e-mail a line or two to another person, or send a hand-scrawled note to another.

Punishment

Unquestionably there will be times when you’ll need to threaten or administer an unpleasant consequence to stop an employee’s undesirable behavior. Sometimes it’s best to address a problem by combining punishment with positive reinforcement. Some suggestions for using punishment are as follows.

· Punish only undesirable behavior. You should give punishment only when employees show frequent undesirable behavior. Otherwise, employees may come to view you negatively, as a tyrannical boss. Thus, for example, you should reprimand employees who show up, say, a half hour late for work but not 5 or 10 minutes late.

· Page 420Give reprimands or disciplinary actions as soon as possible. You should mete out punishment as soon as possible after the undesirable behavior occurs. Thus, you should give a reprimand to a late-arriving employee as soon as he or she arrives.

· Be clear about what behavior is undesirable. Tell employees exactly what kinds of work behaviors are undesirable and make any disciplinary action or reprimand match the behavior. A manager should not, for example, dock an hourly employee’s pay if he or she is only 5 or 10 minutes late for work.

· Administer punishment in private. You would hate to have your boss chew you out in front of your subordinates, and the people who report to you also shouldn’t be reprimanded in public, which would lead only to resentments that may have nothing to do with an employee’s infractions.

· Combine punishment and positive reinforcement. If you’re reprimanding an employee, be sure to also say what he or she is doing right and state what rewards the employee might be eligible for. For example, while reprimanding someone for being late, say that a perfect attendance record over the next few months will put that employee in line for a raise or promotion. ●

Punishment. What do you feel if you see a police car with lights and siren coming up behind you? Would getting a $260 speeding ticket change your behavior? What if it happened several times? Yet consider also other, presumably stronger forms of governmental punishment that are supposed to act as deterrents to bad behavior. Does the possibility of the death penalty really deter homicides? Why or why not?© YAY Media AS/Alamy Stock Photo

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12.6

Using Compensation, Nonmonetary Incentives, and Other Rewards to Motivate: In Search of the Positive Work Environment

MAJOR QUESTION How can I use compensation and other rewards to motivate people?

THE BIG PICTURE

Compensation, the main motivator of performance, includes pay for performance, bonuses, profit sharing, gainsharing, stock options, and pay for knowledge. Other, nonmonetary incentives address needs that aren’t being met, such as work–life balance, growth in skills, positive work environment, and meaning in work. 

Here let us consider the principal tools found in the modern workplace to motivate employees to perform—and to perform at the height of their abilities. We begin with various forms of compensation. We then address nonmonetary incentives: employees’ (1) need for work–life balance, (2) need to expand their skills, (3) need for a positive work environment, and (4) need to matter—to find meaning in their work.

Would you, as a young professional, be willing to take a $7,600 pay cut for a better quality of work life?

That’s what most Millennial professionals said, in a recent study by Fidelity Investments.98 Most said they wouldn’t mind taking a hefty pay cut “if it meant improved work–life balance, career development, company culture, and purposeful work,” according to one report.99

Is Money the Best Motivator?

Whatever happened to good old money as a motivator?

Most workers rate having a caring boss higher than they value monetary benefits, according to several surveys.100 For 30 years, the Great Place to Work Institute has determined that the bedrock features of a great workplace consist of three things: “pride, camaraderie, and trust in leaders”—that is, pride in the company, camaraderie with colleagues, and trust in management.101 Clearly, then, motivating doesn’t just involve dollars.

Motivation and Compensation

Most people are paid an hourly wage or a weekly or monthly salary. Both of these are easy for organizations to administer, of course. But by itself a wage or a salary gives an employee little incentive to work hard. Incentive compensation plans try to do so, although no single plan will boost the performance of all employees. (Indeed, a Wall Street Journal analysis found that none of 2015’s highest-paid CEOs ran one of the 10 best-performing companies. Only three of those executives headed a firm ranked among the top 10% in total shareholder return.)102

Characteristics of the Best Incentive Compensation Plans

In accordance with most of the theories of motivation we described earlier, for incentive plans to work, certain criteria are advisable, as follows. (1) Rewards must be linked to performance and be measurable. (2) The rewards must satisfy individual needs. (3) The rewards must be agreed on by manager and employees. (4) The rewards must be believable and achievable by employees.

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Popular Incentive Compensation Plans

In what way would you like to be rewarded for your efforts? Some of the most well-known incentive compensation plans are pay for performance, bonuses, profit sharing, gainsharing, stock options, and pay for knowledge.

· Pay for performance. Also known as merit pay,  pay for performance  bases pay on one’s results. Thus, different salaried employees might get different pay raises and other rewards (such as promotions) depending on their overall job performance. 103

Examples: One standard pay-for-performance plan is payment according to a  piece rate, in which employees are paid according to how much output they produce, as is often used with farm workers picking fruits or vegetables. Another is the  sales commission, in which sales representatives are paid a percentage of the earnings the company made from their sales, so that the more they sell, the more they are paid. 104

· Bonuses.  Bonuses  are cash awards given to employees who achieve specific performance objectives.

Example: The department store Nieman Marcus pays its salespeople a percentage of the earnings from the goods they sell.

Unfortunately, the documents that most companies file (proxy documents to the Securities and Exchange Commission) to explain what specific targets executives had to meet to earn their bonuses are not very clear, being couched mainly in legalese. 105

· Profit sharing.  Profit sharing  is the distribution to employees of a percentage of the company’s profits.

Example: In one T-shirt and sweatshirt manufacturing company, 10% of pretax profits are distributed to employees every month, and more is given out at the end of the year. Distributions are apportioned according to such criteria as performance, attendance, and lateness for individual employees.

· Gainsharing.  Gainsharing  is the distribution of savings or “gains” to groups of employees who reduced costs and increased measurable productivity. Gainsharing has been applied in a variety of industries, from manufacturing to nonprofit, and is said to be used in more than a quarter of Fortune 1,000 companies, as well as many small to mid-size businesses. 106  In one version (the so-called Scanlon plan), a portion of any cost savings, usually 75%, is distributed to employees. 

Example: In a recent year, Indianapolis-based Mike’s Carwash paid out $569,000 in gainsharing to 437 employees in 37 locations who had been challenged to beat targets set at the corporate level. Employees averaged $1.25 extra per hour.107 Gainsharing has also been used to get truck drivers to ease off the accelerator in order to achieve fleet sustainability goals to increase fuel economy and decrease greenhouse gas emissions.108

· Stock options. With  stock options, certain employees are given the right to buy stock at a future date for a discounted price. About 20% of the U.S. workforce outside the government participate in some sort of employee stock ownership program.109 The motivator here is that employees holding stock options will supposedly work hard to make the company’s stock rise so that they can obtain it at a cheaper price. Along with its other benefits, by giving stock options to all employees who work 20 or more hours a week, Starbucks Corp. has been able to hold its employee turnover rate to about 65% per year (25% for managers) compared to 150%–400% for employees at chain retailers (50% for managers).110 

· Pay for knowledge. Also known as skill-based pay,  pay for knowledge  ties employee pay to the number of job-relevant skills or academic degrees they earn. 111

Example: The teaching profession is a time-honored instance of this incentive, in which elementary and secondary teachers are encouraged to increase their salaries by earning further college credit. However, firms such as FedEx also have pay-for-knowledge plans.

Page 423 Motivation as a small business owner. Pizza chef Tony Gemignani demonstrates the proper technique for making pizza. Gemignani, who worked in and studied many U.S. pizza parlors, was inspired by a 2000 visit to Italy to learn how to make award-winning char-spotted, soft-centered Neapolitan pizza, a learning process that took seven years and involved grinding his own sausage and pulling his own mozarella. Opening his own restaurant in 2009 showed that he had read the market correctly for American public taste and love of choices. Coupling good food with a flair for the dramatic (restaurant decor featuring metal sculptures resembling tribal tattoos, for instance), Gemignani and his partners opened Pizza Rock, which now has several California and Nevada stores.112 For some people, like Gemignani, the only way to merge motivation and compensation is to own and manage their own business. What factors or incentives motivate you to work hard?© Eric Risberg/AP Photo

Nonmonetary Ways of Motivating Employees

Employees who can behave autonomously, solve problems, and take the initiative are apt to be the very ones who will leave if they find their own needs aren’t being met—namely, (1) the need for work–life balance, (2) the need to expand their skills, (3) the need for a positive work environment, and (4) the need to matter—to find meaning in their work.

The Need for Work–Life Balance

For more than half of men and women in a 2013 Accenture survey, work–life balance was the key determinant of career success—ahead of money, recognition, autonomy, or making a difference. 113  In another survey, 46% of employees said work–life balance was the thing they valued most when looking for a new job (second only to salary, cited by 57%). According to Pew Research, Millennials in particular are apt to say the most important things in life are “being a good parent” (52%) and “having a successful marriage” (30%), rather than “having a high-paying career” (15%). 114

As mentioned, most Millennial professionals said they wouldn’t mind taking a big pay cut if it meant improved work–life balance, career development, and purposeful work.115 A Gallup poll finds they want good jobs, with regular paychecks from employers, and they want to be engaged in those jobs, but they want to be able to talk to their managers about non-work-related issues.116

Among the employer offerings designed to cater to the desire for work–life balance (at least for some employees) are work–life benefits, flex-time, and vacation/sabbatical time:

· Work–life benefits. Work–life benefits are employer-sponsored benefit programs or initiatives designed to help all employees balance work life with home life. 117  The purpose of such benefits is to remove barriers that make it hard for people to strike a balance between their work and personal lives, such as allowing parents time off to take care of sick children. The worst obstacles to work–life balance, according to one survey, are bad bosses—defined as “demanding, overbearing, and mean.” Constant work beyond standard business hours and inflexible scheduling tied for second. Third were incompetent colleagues and long commutes.118

Work–life benefits include helping employees with day care costs or even establishing on-site centers; offering domestic-partner benefits; giving job-protected leave for new parents; and providing technology such as mobile phones and laptops to enable parents to work at home.119 (Unfortunately, the workplace culture often tends to discourage paid leave for parents, particularly fathers.)120

How good are U.S. employers at making work–life benefits available? The United States actually ranks fairly low on this feature—29 out of 36 on a list of countries with the best work–life balance.121 And although two-thirds (67%) of HR professionals think their employees have a balanced work life, according to one survey, among employees themselves nearly half (45%) still crave more time each week for personal activities.122

Page 424 Balancing work with life. Work factors don’t always allow for life factors—sick children, school appointments, family emergencies, problems with aging parents, medical appointments, and other personal matters. People around the world are urging employees to ease the single-minded focus on jobs by introducing more flexibility and balance into their lives—work–life balance. What are the top three nonwork concerns that you might have to deal with that you hope your employer might accommodate for you?© Paul Bradbury/Getty Images RF

· Flex-time. By flex-time, we do not mean the so-called on-call schedules once practiced by Abercrombie & Fitch, Williams-Sonoma, and other stores that required workers to be on call for shifts that could be canceled with little notice—schedules that demoralized employees and hurt children’s well-being.123 Rather, we are talking about the flexible workplace—including part-time work, flex-time, a compressed workweek, job sharing, and telecommuting—discussed in the Manager’s Toolbox at the start of this chapter.

In one flex-time experiment, in which employees were told they could work wherever and whenever they chose as long as projects were completed on time and goals were met, such employees not only met their goals (as well as did a control group) but were sleeping better, less stressed, and less interested in leaving the organization a year later.124

· Vacations and sabbaticals. It used to be a badge of honor for Citigroup’s junior bankers to put in 100-hour work weeks. Now, says CEO Michael Corbat, “I want people to have family lives, personal lives.” Recently, the bank unveiled a program that lets young employees take a long sabbatical—an extended vacation—during which the Citigroup volunteers are paid 60% of their salary, and take a year off to do charitable work helping, say, businesses develop growth plans in Kenya.125

Tech companies like Apple and Genentech certainly understand that in a climate of 80-hour work weeks people need to recharge themselves. But even The Cheesecake Factory offers employees with at least five years of service sabbaticals of up to three weeks, with additional ones every five years thereafter. (One employee planned to hike the 220-mile John Muir Trail in California from Yosemite to Mt.Whitney.)126

About 4% of American corporations, most of them technology firms, offer unlimited paid time off.127 Whatever the arrangement, the aim, of course, is to enable employees to reenergize themselves but also, it is hoped, to cement their loyalty to the organization.128 (Ironically, however, most employees with unlimited time off are unlikely to use much of it—and if they quit or get fired, they will not get a payout for unused vacation days.)

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The Need to Expand Skills

As mentioned in  Chapter 9 , 70% of employees say they are dissatisfied with career growth opportunities at their companies, and training programs can keep them engaged with their work.129 Young workers in particular, having watched their parents undergo downsizing, are apt to view a job as a way of gaining skills that will enable them to earn a decent living in the future. Employers have another point of view: They see it as developing human capital, which, as we saw in  Chapter 9 , is the economic or protective potential of employee knowledge, experience, and actions.

Learning opportunities can take three forms:

· Studying coworkers. Managers can see that workers are matched with coworkers from whom they can learn, allowing them, for instance, to “shadow” (watch and imitate) workers in other jobs or be in interdepartmental task forces.

· Tuition reimbursement. There can also be tuition reimbursement for part-time study at a college or university.130

· Training. About 30% of small companies, 41% of midsize companies, and 29% of large companies offer some sort of training, according to a 2015 training industry report.131 Although instructor-led classrooms are still the dominant training method, we pointed out earlier that at about 46% of total student hours, 26.5% of training was delivered by online or computer-based technologies, 1.8% by mobile devices, and 31.9% by blended techniques.132  

The Need for a Positive Work Environment

Wanting to work in a positive environment begins with the idea of well-being.  Well-being is the combined impact of five elements—positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and achievement (PERMA), according to renowned psychologist Martin Seligman.133 There is one essential consideration to remember about these elements: We must pursue them for their own sake, not as a means to obtain another outcome. In other words, well-being comes about by freely pursuing one or more of the five elements in PERMA.

Flourishing  represents the extent to which our lives contain PERMA. When we flourish, our lives result in “goodness … growth, and resilience.”134 We should all strive to flourish because of its association with other positive outcomes, like lower cardiovascular risk, lower levels of inflammation, longer life, better sleep, and positive mental health.135 Unfortunately, many people are not flourishing. For example, a recent survey of 160,000 people around the world revealed that 33% reported above-average stress.136 U.S. data further showed that a majority of people lose sleep because of work-related stress and many people are abusing painkillers to combat it. Painkiller abuse costs employers about $25.5 billion a year in absenteeism and lost productivity.137

By contrast, positive emotions broaden your perspective about how to overcome challenges in your life—joy, for instance, is more likely to lead you to envision creative ideas during a brainstorming session. Positive emotions also build on themselves, resulting in a spreading of positive emotions within yourself and those around you.138

What is it that employers can do to create a positive work environment? Elsewhere in the book we have touched on such matters as employee engagement, social support, and recognition for achievement. Here let us discuss just two other factors: (1) surroundings and (2) an understanding boss.

· Surroundings. The cubicle, according to new research, is stifling the creativity and morale of many workers, and the bias of modern-day office designers for open spaces and neutral colors is leading to employee complaints that their workplaces are too noisy or too bland. Some businesses, such as advertising giant Grey Group in New York, have even moved beyond cubicles to completely open offices, which at Grey required a business psychologist to hold “space therapy” sessions to ease employee concerns.139

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“The key to successful workspaces is to empower individuals by giving them choices that allow control over their work environment,” says a Harvard Business Review article.140 That’s especially key when it comes to keeping employees happy.

EXAMPLE

Successful Workspaces

As we said, the traditional private office has yielded to cubicles and more recently to open-plan offices with few or no walls. (Indeed, Facebook hired a world-famous architect to design an office that is a single room stretching 10 acres and accommodating several thousand engineers.)141

Distractions or Performance? Although crowding people together can promote cooperative behavior, it also, of course, leads to lack of privacy and increased distractions, which can stifle creativity, dampen morale, and lead to diminished individual and organizational performance. 142

“There is no such thing as something that works for everybody,” says Alan Hedge, a professor of environmental analysis at Cornell University. 143  An 8-foot-by-8-foot cubicle may not be a good visual trigger for human brains, and companies wanting to improve creativity and productivity may need to think about giving office employees better things to look at.144

YOUR CALL

Although 70% of today’s organizations have open-plan offices, other designs are now being tried that go beyond the “open” and “closed” models and can balance people’s wishes for privacy against the competing desire for collaboration.145 “The emerging trend is the hybrid approach,” says one workplace strategist, “which includes about a 15% to 30% closed plan with a variety of other work areas to supplement just sitting at a desk.”146 What kind of office surroundings would work best for you?

· Thoughtful bosses. It’s said that “people don’t leave jobs, they leave managers,” points out a Forbes writer, citing evidence of a survey from the United Kingdom in which 42% of 1,374 employees left a job because of a bad boss and almost a third felt their present boss was a bad manager.147 A Gallup study also found that about 50% of the 7,200 adults surveyed left a job “to get away from their manager.”148 Some of these employees were well paid, but is this enough?

PRACTICAL ACTION

Thoughtfulness: The Value of Being Nice

“Feeling cared for by one’s supervisor has a more significant impact on people’s sense of trust than any other behavior by a leader,” says one article summarizing the results of a global workforce study. “Employees who say they have more supportive supervisors are 1.3 times as likely to stay with the organization and are 67% more engaged.”149

A study by McKinsey & Company, a global management consulting firm, found that nonfinancial incentives such as praise and commendation from one’s immediate management (which 67% of those surveyed thought extremely or very effective) and attention from leaders (by 63%) were better motivators than three financial incentives: performance-based cash bonuses (60%), increase in base pay (52%), and stock or stock options (35%).150

What the Managers Should Do

The co-founder of one start-up, James Lintern of software maker RotaCloud, suggests you need to learn to look for disgruntled employees (those who moan a lot, feign ignorance or innocence, or simply stay quiet and stop working) and then speak with them privately but professionally and provide support, if necessary.151

Giving Praise

“Being nice” to employees means, for example, giving personal and frequent praise, writing celebratory emails to supervisors (and copying the employee), giving public recognition, and writing handwritten thank-you notes. You might evenPage 427 imitate that former KFC president who recognized valued employees by giving away floppy rubber chickens and $100.152

It’s important, of course, that praise be effective. One business writer points out that managers often undermine the power of recognition by (1) withholding it altogether (so as not to accidentally favor or ignore anyone), (2) spreading praise 100% evenly across a team, and (3) mindlessly crediting groups at the expense of individuals.153

YOUR CALL

What are the top three things you’d like to see in a thoughtful boss? Would you rather work for someone who is “nice” but lacking in other qualities (decisiveness, leadership)? Or would you prefer to report to someone who seems to be indifferent to your feelings and never listens to you but is running a successful operation that’s giving you a good paycheck?

The Need to Matter—Finding Meaning in Work 

Workers now want to be with an organization that allows them to feel they matter. They want to commit to their profession or fellow team members rather than have to profess a blind loyalty to the corporation.154 In particular, employees of small firms (under 1,000 people) “want to feel their ideas and efforts materially contribute to the success of their employers,” according to one survey.155

World War II concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning, strongly believed that “striving to find a meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force” for people.156 In other words, it is the drive to find meaning in our lives that instills in us a sense of purpose and motivation to pursue goals.

Meaningfulness , then, is the sense of “belonging to and serving something that you believe is bigger than the self.” 157  What follows are three suggestions for building meaning into your life.

1. Identify activities you love doing. Try to do more of these activities or find ways to build them into your work role.

Example: Employees at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis embody this suggestion. They truly enjoy participating in the St. Jude Marathon weekend because it raises money for the children being treated at the hospital. One employee, a cancer survivor, commented, “Each year it provides me with another opportunity to give back so that we can help countless other children have anniversaries of their own.”158

2. Find a way to build your natural strengths into your personal and work life. Want to be more engaged with your school, work, and leisure activities? Take the time to list your highest strengths, your weaknesses, which strengths you use on a daily basis—and find what you can do to incorporate your strengths into your school, work, and leisure activities.

3. Go out and help someone. Research shows that people derive a sense of meaningfulness from helping others, that it creates an upward spiral of positivity.159

Example:  Salesforce.com  encourages this result by giving employees six paid days a year to volunteer. All told, company employees logged over 1 million volunteer hours in 2015.160

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13.1

Groups versus Teams

MAJOR QUESTION How is one collection of workers different from any other?

THE BIG PICTURE

Teamwork promises to be a cornerstone of future management. A team is different from a group. A group typically is management-directed, a team self-directed. Groups may be formal, created to do productive work, or informal, created for friendship. Work teams engage in collective work requiring coordinated effort. Other types of teams are project teams, cross-functional teams, self-managed teams, and virtual teams.

Over a quarter century ago, management philosopher Peter Drucker predicted that future organizations would not only be flatter and information-based but also organized around teamwork—and that has certainly come to pass. 6

In fact, your ability to work well as a team member can affect your job opportunities and success, as well as influencing the kind of employers that might appeal to you. Jenny Gottstein is director of games at The Go Game, a company that builds interactive games to promote team-building in large organizations including Facebook, Google, and American Express. “We’re seeing companies use their strong corporate culture as a bargaining chip to recruit the best and brightest talent. When applying for jobs, millennial employees are not only assessing their salary and benefits, but also whether or not they relate to the working environment, and enjoy rolling up their sleeves next to their peers. As a result of this culture shift, team-building is being used as a marketing and recruitment tool.”7 

When you take a job in an organization, the chances are you won’t be working alone. You’ll be working with others in situations requiring teamwork.

The argument for promoting diversity suggested by scholar Scott E. Page (see  Chapter 3 )—namely, that different kinds of people “bring to organizations more and different ways of seeing a problem and, thus, faster/better ways of solving it”—is also a principal strength of teams. 8  However, teamwork is now the cornerstone of progressive management for many other reasons, as the table below shows. (See  Table 13.1 .)

TABLE 13.1   Why Teamwork Is Important

THE IMPROVEMENTS	EXAMPLE
Increased productivity	At one GE factory, teamwork resulted in a workforce that was 20% more productive than comparable GE workforces elsewhere.
Increased speed	Guidant Corp., maker of lifesaving medical devices, halved the time it took to get products to market.
Reduced costs	Boeing used teamwork to develop the 777 at costs far less than normal.
Improved quality	Westinghouse used teamwork to improve quality performance in its truck and trailer division and within its electronic components division.
Reduced destructive internal competition	Men’s Wearhouse fired a salesman who wasn’t sharing walk-in customer traffic, and total clothing sales volume among all salespeople increased significantly.
Improved workplace cohesiveness	Cisco Systems told executives they would gain or lose 30% of their bonuses based on how well they worked with peers and in three years had record profits.

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Groups and Teams: How Do They Differ?

Aren’t a group of people and a team of people the same thing? By and large, no. One is a collection of people, the other a powerful unit of collective performance. One is typically management-directed, the other self-directed.

Consider the differences, as follows.

What a Group Is: A Collection of People Performing as Individuals

A group  is defined as (1) two or more freely interacting individuals who (2) share norms, (3) share goals, and (4) have a common identity. 9  A group is different from a crowd, a transitory collection of people who don’t interact with one another, such as a crowd gathering on a sidewalk to watch a fire. And it is different from an organization, such as a labor union, which is so large that members also don’t interact.

An example of a work group would be a collection of 10 employees meeting to exchange information about various companies’ policies on wages and hours.

What a Team Is: A Collection of People with Common Commitment

McKinsey & Company management consultants Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith say it is a mistake to use the terms group and team interchangeably. Successful teams, they say, tend to take on a life of their own. Thus, a  team  is defined as a small group of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable. 10  “The essence of a team is common commitment,” say Katzenbach and Smith. “Without it, groups perform as individuals; with it, they become a powerful unit of collective performance.” 11

An example of a team is a collection of 2–10 employees who are studying industry pay scales, with the goal of making recommendations for adjusting pay grades within their own company.

Xero, an award-winning maker of accounting software for small businesses, relies on motivation to help its employee teams keep sight of their common commitment in the midst of the company’s rapid global growth. “Clearly defining your purpose, communicating it effectively, and empowering your employees is one of the purest ways to motivate a team,” says CEO Rod Drury. 12  

 How do you feel about working in teams? To find out, try  Self-Assessment 13.1 .

SELF-ASSESSMENT 13.1  

Attitudes toward Teamwork

The following survey was designed to assess your attitude toward teamwork. Please be prepared to answer these questions if your instructor has assigned Self-Assessment 13.1 in Connect.

1. What is your attitude toward teamwork?

2. If you do not have a positive teamwork attitude, consider the reason and identify what you might do to foster a more positive attitude.

3. Develop three potential questions that a recruiter might ask to determine if you are positively disposed to teamwork. Now answer the questions.

Formal versus Informal Groups

Groups can be either formal or informal. 13

· Formal groups—created to accomplish specific goals. A  formal group  is a group assigned by organizations or its managers to accomplish specific goals. A formal group may be a division, a department, a work group, or a committee. It may be permanent or temporary. In general, people are assigned to them according to their skills and the organization’s requirements.

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Informal groups—created for friendship. An  informal group  is a group formed by people whose overriding purpose is getting together for friendship or a common interest. An informal group may be simply a collection of friends who hang out with one another, such as those who take coffee breaks together, or it may be as organized as a prayer breakfast, a bowling team, a service club, a company “alumni group” (for example, former Apple employees), or other voluntary organization.

What’s important for you as a manager to know is that informal groups can advance or undercut the plans of formal groups. The formal organization may make efforts, say, to speed up the plant assembly line or to institute workplace reforms. But these attempts may be sabotaged through the informal networks of workers who meet and gossip over lunch pails and after-work beers. 14

However, interestingly, informal groups can also be highly productive—even more so than formal groups.

EXAMPLE

Informal Groups and Informal Learning: Sharing Knowledge in the Lunchroom and on Social Media

As a manager, what would you think if you saw employees making brief conversation near the lunchroom coffeepot? “The assumption was made that this was chitchat, talking about their golf game,” said a training director at the Siemens Power Transmission and Distribution plant in Wendell, North Carolina, where managers worried about workers gathering so often in the cafeteria. “But there was a whole lot of work activity.” 15

Workplace Learning: Mostly Informal. And indeed research has found that 70% of workplace learning is informal. 16  With this knowledge, Siemens managers alerted supervisors about the informal meetings and even placed overhead projectors and empty pads of paper in the lunchroom to facilitate the exchange of information. Employees at Ed Doherty’s Panera Bread restaurants learn about customer service and company culture from storytelling. In one often recounted incident, a customer drove to a store during a blizzard to place an order. He inadvertently left his food there by mistake and called the store to inform the manager. “The store was about to close as the snow piled up, so the manager decided to deliver the order to the customer’s house.”17

The Peer-to-Peer Web. What about when employees are in far-flung places? “Sales reps are out in the field and they’re kind of on islands,” pointed out an Indianapolis software-firm executive. “It’s a challenge to keep everyone connected.” 18  So when the 75 reps started overwhelming the sales-support staff with questions about product details and client information, the company created a website on which the reps could post and answer questions in an informal peer-to-peer learning setting. (Incidentally, to do parts of their jobs, 47% of business technology users at North American and European companies use websites that are not sanctioned by their corporate information technology department, according to one study.) 19

Talking it out. Ever worked in a job in which you got a lot of informal training through conversations over coffee? Could this be done with social networking?© BananaStock/Jupiterimages RF

YOUR CALL

Can games (such as the online multiplayer game Second Life) or other social media (Facebook, Twitter) be used to foster informal workplace collaboration? How about allowing employees to BYOD—“bring your own device” to work, such as their own smartphone or tablet? 20

Types of Teams

Different types of teams have different characteristics. We can differentiate some typical teams according to their

1. Purpose.

2. Duration.

3. Level of member commitment.

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Work Teams

A company’s audit team and a professional sports team have several things in common. Like all work teams, they have a clear purpose that all members share. These teams are usually permanent, and members must give their complete commitment to the team’s purpose in order for the team to succeed.

Project Teams

If you have ever completed a team project for a class, you have been part of a project team. Project teams at work are assembled to solve a particular problem or complete a specific task, such as brainstorming new marketing ideas for one of the company’s products. Members can meet just once or work together for many years, depending on the nature of the assignment, and they may meet virtually or face to face. They can come from the same or different departments or functional areas, and while serving on the project team, they continue to fulfill their primary responsibilities.

Cross-Functional Teams

Cross-functional teams  are designed to include members from different areas within an organization, such as finance, operations, and sales. Cross-functional teams can serve any purpose, they can be work teams or project teams, and their assignment can be long- or short-term. Brian Walker, CEO of furniture maker Herman Miller, described how his company uses cross-functional teams to work on new-product design:

“We’re big believers in putting teams together. … We’re very willing to move folks around between departments. In our design process, for example, we deliberately create tension by putting together a cross-functional team that includes people from manufacturing, finance, research, ergonomics, marketing and sales. The manufacturing guys want something they know they can make easily and fits their processes. The salespeople want what their customers have been asking for. The tension comes from finding the right balance, being willing to follow those creative leaps to the new place, and convincing the organization it’s worth the risk.” 21

Self-Managed Teams

Working as a team. This group of employees seems to be acting like a team. We see everyone actively focused on the task at hand. Have you experienced the difference in working for a group verse a team? How would you describe the key differences? © Gregory Kramer/Getty Images RF

  Self-managed teams  are defined as groups of workers who are given administrative oversight for their task domains. Experts estimate about 80% of Fortune 1,000 and 81% of manufacturing firms use self-managed teams.22 They are expected to foster increased productivity and employee quality of work life because employees are delegated greater authority and granted increased autonomy. 23

The most common chores of today’s self-managed teams are work scheduling and customer interaction, and the least common are hiring and firing. Most self-managed teamsPage 440 are also found at the shop-floor level in factory settings, although some experts predict growth of the practice in service operations and even management ranks. Self-managed teams have been found to have a positive effect on productivity and attitudes of self-responsibility and control, although there is no significant effect on job satisfaction and organizational commitment. 24  

Research also shows self-managed teams are most effective when some guidance is provided by a leader and when the team has supportive technology.25 Although these conclusions don’t qualify as a sweeping endorsement of self-managed teams, experts expect a trend toward such teams in North America because of a strong cultural bias in favor of direct participation. 

Virtual Teams

Virtual teams  work together over time and distance via electronic media to combine effort and achieve common goals. Given technological advances, they are growing in popularity. A recent survey revealed 66% of multinational companies rely on them.26 

Advocates say virtual teams are very flexible and efficient because they are driven by information and skills, not by time and location. People with needed information and/or skills can be team members, regardless of where or when they actually do their work. 27  Nevertheless, virtual teams have pros and cons like every other type of team.

Working virtually. Technology not only allows people to communicate where, when, and with whom they wish, but it also allows many people and organizations to work without offices. What are the advantages and disadvantages for you personally of telecommuting and virtual work?© Image Source/Getty Images RF

Virtual teams and distributed workers present many potential benefits: reduced real estate costs (limited or no office space); ability to leverage diverse knowledge, skills, and experience across geography and time (you don’t have to have an SAP expert in every office); ability to share knowledge of diverse markets; and reduced commuting and travel expenses. The flexibility often afforded by virtual teams also can reduce work–life conflicts for employees, which some employers contend makes it easier for them to attract and retain talent. 28

Virtual teams have challenges, too. It is more difficult for them than for face-to-face teams to establish team cohesion, work satisfaction, trust, cooperative behavior, and commitment to team goals.29 Thus, virtual teams should be used with caution. It should be no surprise that building team relationships is more difficult when members are geographically distributed. This hurdle and time zone differences are challenges reported by nearly 50% of companies using virtual teams. Members of virtual teams also reported being unable to observe the nonverbal cues of other members and a lack of collegiality.30 These challenges apply to virtual teams more generally, as does the difficulty of leading such teams.31 When virtual teams cross country borders, cultural differences, holidays, and local laws and customs also can cause problems.

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PRACTICAL ACTION

Best Practices for Virtual Teams 

We put together a collection of best practices to help focus your efforts and accelerate your success as a member or leader of a virtual team.32

1. Adapt your communications. Learn how the various remote workers function, including their preferences for e-mail, texts, and phone calls. It often is advisable to have regularly scheduled calls (via Skype). Be strategic and talk to the right people at the right times about the right topics. Don’t just blanket everybody via e-mail—focus your message. Accommodate the different time zones in a fair and consistent manner.

2. Share the love. Use your company’s intranet or other technology to keep distributed workers in the loop. Acknowledging birthdays and recognizing accomplishments are especially important for those who are not regularly in the office. Newsletters also can help and serve as a touch point and vehicle for communicating best practices and success stories.

3. Develop productive relationships with key people on the team. This may require extra attention, communication, and travel, but do what it takes. Key people are the ones you can lean on and the ones who will make or break the team assignment.

4. Be a good partner. Often members of virtual teams are not direct employees of your employer but are independent contractors. Nevertheless, your success and that of your team depend on them. Treat them like true partners and not hired help. You need them and presumably they need you.

5. Be available. Managers and remote workers all need to know when people can be reached, where, and how. Let people know and make yourself available.

6. Document the work. Because of different time zones, some projects can receive attention around the clock, as they are handed off from one zone to the next. Doing this effectively requires that both senders and receivers clearly specify what they have completed and what they need in each transfer.

7. Provide updates. Even if you are not the boss, or your boss doesn’t ask for them, be sure to provide regular updates on your progress to the necessary team members. 33

8. Select the right people. “The best virtual workers tend to be those who thrive in interdependent work relationships … [and] are self-reliant and self-motivated. … Virtual work requires independent thought and willingness to take initiative. Those who tend to struggle in virtual team situations are people who wait for instructions and want to be told what to do.” 34

9. Use your communication skills. Because so much communication is written, virtual team members must have excellent communication skills and write well in-easy-to-understand and to-the-point language.

Researchers and consultants agree about one aspect of virtual teams—there is no substitute for face-to-face contact. Meeting in person is especially beneficial early in virtual team development, and team leaders are encouraged to meet even more frequently with key members. 35  Face-to-face interactions can be as simple as lunch, water-cooler conversations, social events, or periodic meetings. Whatever the case, such interactions enable people to get familiar with each other and build credibility, trust, and understanding. This reduces misunderstandings and makes subsequent virtual interactions more efficient and effective, and it increases job performance and reduces conflict and intentions to quit. 36

Face-to-face interactions enable people to get real-time feedback, forge meaningful and real connections, and get a better sense of what others actually think and feel.37 Moreover, virtual teams cannot succeed without some additional and old-fashioned factors, such as effective decision making, good communication, training, a clear mission and specific objectives, effective leadership, schedules, and deadlines. 38  Underlying many of these is one of the truly essential elements to effective teams of all types—trust.

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13.2

Stages of Group and Team Development

MAJOR QUESTION How does a group evolve into a team?

THE BIG PICTURE

Groups can evolve into teams by going through five stages of development: forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning. They can also develop if they are forced to change in response to a crisis. We’ll look at both these processes.

Tuckman’s Five-Stage Model

Managers often talk of products and organizations going through stages of development, from birth to maturity to decline. Groups and teams go through the same thing. One theory proposes five stages of development: forming, storming, norming, performing, adjourning. 39  (See  Figure 13.1 .)

FIGURE 13.1  Five stages of group and team development

Let us consider these stages in which groups may evolve into teams—bearing in mind that the stages often aren’t of the same duration or intensity or even necessarily always in this sequence.

Stage 1: Forming—“Why Are We Here?”

The first stage,  forming, is the process of getting oriented and getting acquainted. This stage is characterized by a high degree of uncertainty as members try to break the ice and figure out who is in charge and what the group’s goals are. For example, if you were to become part of a team that is to work on a class project, the question for you as an individual would be “How do I fit in here?” For the group, the question is “Why are we here?” 40

At this point, mutual trust is low, and there is a good deal of holding back to see who takes charge and how. Conflict at this stage may actually be beneficial, leading to increased creativity. 41  At this juncture, if the formal leader (such as the class instructor or a supervisor) does not assert his or her authority, an emergent leader will eventually step in to fill the group’s need for leadership and direction. During this stage, leaders should allow time for people to become acquainted and to socialize. 

Stage 2: Storming—“Why Are We Fighting over Who’s in Charge and Who Does What?”

The second stage,  storming, is characterized by the emergence of individual personalities and roles and conflicts within the group. For you as an individual, the question is “What’s my role here?” For the group, the issue is “Why are we fighting over who’s in charge and who does what?” This stage may be of short duration or painfully long, depending on the goal clarity and the commitment and maturity of the members.

This is a time of testing. Individuals test the leader’s policies and assumptions as they try to determine how they fit into the power structure. Subgroups take shape, and subtle forms of rebellion, such as procrastination, occur. Many groups stall in stage 2 because power politics may erupt into open rebellion.

In this stage, the leader should encourage members to suggest ideas, voice disagreements, and work through their conflicts about tasks and goals.

Stage 3: Norming—“Can We Agree on Roles and Work as a Team?”

In the third stage,  norming, conflicts are resolved, close relationships develop, and unity and harmony emerge. For individuals, the main issue is “What do the others expect me to do?” For the group, the issue is “Can we agree on roles and work as a team?” Note, then, that the group may now evolve into a team.

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Teams set guidelines related to what members will do together and how they will do it. The teams consider such matters as attendance at meetings, being late, and missing assignments as well as how members treat one another.

Groups that make it through stage 2 generally do so because a respected member other than the leader challenges the group to resolve its power struggles so something can be accomplished. Questions about authority are resolved through unemotional, matter-of-fact group discussion. A feeling of team spirit is experienced because members believe they have found their proper roles.  Group cohesiveness, a “we feeling” binding group members together, is the principal by-product of stage 3. 42  (We discuss cohesiveness next, in  Section 13.3 .)

This stage generally does not last long. Here the leader should emphasize unity and help identify team goals and values.

Stage 4: Performing—“Can We Do the Job Properly?”

In  performing, members concentrate on solving problems and completing the assigned task. For individuals, the question here is “How can I best perform my role?” For the group/team, the issue is “Can we do the job properly?” During this stage, the leader should allow members the empowerment they need to work on tasks.

Turning teamwork into action. This group of students is participating in a science fair in Athens, Greece. The group clearly is in the performing stage of group development. Does it appear that all participants are equally engaged in dealing with the task at hand? If you were a member of this group, what would you do to motivate all members to actively participate in completing the task?  © Melanie Stetson Freeman/AP Photo

Stage 5: Adjourning—“Can We Help Members Transition Out?”

In the final stage,  adjourning, members prepare for disbandment. Having worked so hard to get along and get something done, many members feel a compelling sense of loss. For the individual, the question now is “What’s next?” For the team, the issue is “Can we help members transition out?”

The leader can help ease the transition by rituals celebrating “the end” and “new beginnings.” Parties, award ceremonies, graduations, or mock funerals can provide the needed punctuation at the end of a significant teamwork project. The leader can emphasize valuable lessons learned in group dynamics to prepare everyone for future group and team efforts. 

Is Tuckman’s Model Accurate?

Although research does not support the notion that groups can’t perform until the performing stage, both academics and practitioners agree that groups have a life cycle.43 Research also tells us that high-performing teams successfully navigating the process of group or team development tend to display productive energy toward getting things done. 44  Do your current teams at work or school display this productive energy? You can find out by completing  Self-Assessment 13.2 .

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SELF-ASSESSMENT 13.2  

Assessing Your Team’s Productive Energy

The following survey was designed to assess your team’s productive energy. Please be prepared to answer these questions if your instructor has assigned Self-Assessment 13.2 in Connect.

1. To what extent does the team display productive energy? Are you surprised by the results?

2. Based on your survey scores, what can be done to improve the level of energy being displayed by the team? Be specific.

3. What would the survey suggest that you should do next time you are the leader of a work or school project team?

Punctuated Equilibrium

Groups don’t always follow the distinct stages of Tuckman’s model. In another type of group development, called  punctuated equilibrium,  they establish periods of stable functioning until an event causes a dramatic change in norms, roles, and/or objectives. The group then establishes and maintains new norms of functioning, returning to equilibrium.  (See  Figure 13.2 ).  Punctuated equilibrium often occurs in the wake of unexpected change. When in June 2016 a slim majority of voters in the UK voted in favor of leaving the European Union, for example, the remaining 27 member countries faced major changes in the economic and political stability of the 23-year-old economic and trade group. Alterations in the way they trade, share resources, and maintain peaceful borders are expected to develop over many years as the EU remakes itself following the loss of one of Europe’s largest economies. In the world of retailing, Walmart’s low-price approach was a change that revolutionized an industry. Companies and teams that can adapt will realize tremendous new opportunities, but those that don’t often find themselves obsolete. Punctuated equilibrium can drive significant change, development, and opportunity.

FIGURE 13.2  Punctuated equilibrium

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13.3

Building Effective Teams

MAJOR QUESTION How can I as a manager build an effective team?

THE BIG PICTURE

To build a group into a high-performance team, managers must consider matters of collaboration, trust, performance goals and feedback, motivation through mutual accountability and interdependence, team composition, roles, and norms. 

“What is a high-performance team?” Current research and practice suggest seven attributes: shared leadership, shared accountability, sense of common purpose, trust and open communication, clear role expectations, early conflict resolution, and collaboration.45 Thus, as a future manager, the first thing you have to realize is that building a high-performance team is going to require some work. But the payoff will be a stronger, better-performing work unit. 46

The most essential considerations in building a group into an effective team are (1) collaboration, (2) trust, (3) performance goals and feedback, (4) motivation through mutual accountability and interdependency, (5) composition, (6) roles, and (7) norms.  

1. Collaboration—the Foundation of Teamwork

Human collaboration has a long history, with some hunter-gatherers in Tanzania—who live much as humans did about 10,000 years ago—linked in social networks very much like ours (without the cell phones and other connections, of course). Indeed, unlike other animals, such as chimpanzees and monkeys, humans are able to build bigger and better tools by sharing knowledge and learning from one another—in short, by collaborating. 

Collaboration is the act of sharing information and coordinating efforts to achieve a collective outcome. As you might expect, teams are more effective when members collaborate.47 Collaboration is the secret sauce enabling teams to produce more than the sum of their parts.48 Many factors can influence collaboration, including how teams are rewarded. 49  For example, Whole Foods reinforces teamwork in its team-based structure by focusing rewards on team rather than individual performance.50

A recent and exhaustive survey by Google was aimed at discovering what made the best of its hundreds of work teams successful. The researchers found that the company’s highest-performing teams shared two characteristic behaviors: (1) Everyone on the team spoke in about equal proportion, meaning that no one hogged the floor or held comments back, and (2) members were very good at interpreting other members’ feelings based on their tone of voice and nonverbal cues. These characteristics led to unusually high levels of collaboration and success. 51   

2. Trust: “We Need to Have Reciprocal Faith in Each Other”

Trust  is defined as reciprocal faith in others’ intentions and behaviors. 52  The word reciprocal emphasizes the give-and-take aspect of trust—that is, we tend to give what we get: Trust begets trust, distrust begets distrust. Trust is based on credibility—how believable you are based on your past acts of integrity and follow-through on your promises.Page 446 As you might expect, research supports a positive relationship between team members’ trust and team performance.53

“The best way to engage employees is to build a culture of trust,” says Jenny Gottstein of The Go Game. “A team that trusts each other and respects everyone’s contribution can make significant cognitive leaps when innovating or problem-solving.”54  

The importance of trust. David A. Ferucci (center), with two IBM colleagues, led a team of artificial intelligence researchers that programmed a computing system named Watson to compete on the game show Jeopardy, whose host, Alex Trebeck, is shown in 2011 talking about the upcoming event. Watson beat the previous (human) grand champions. All successful teams operate within a climate of trust.(left): © Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times/Redux Pictures; (right): © Seth Wenig/AP Photo

3. Performance Goals and Feedback

As an individual, you no doubt prefer to have measurable goals and to have feedback about your performance. The same is true with teams. Teams are not just collections of individuals. They are individuals organized for a collective purpose. That purpose needs to be defined in terms of specific, measurable performance goals with continual feedback to tell team members how well they are doing.55

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An obvious example is the teams you see on television at Indianapolis or Daytona Beach during automobile racing. When the driver guides the race car off the track to make a pit stop, a team of people quickly jack up the car to change tires, refuel the tank, and clean the windshield—all in a matter of seconds. The performance goal is to have the car back on the track as quickly as possible. The number of seconds of elapsed time—and the driver’s place among competitors once back in the race—tells the team how well they are doing.

Cooperation and collaboration. A crew swarms over a car driven by A. J. Allmendinger during a pit stop in the NASCAR 2014 Sprint Cup All-Star Race at Watkins Glen, New York. Cereal maker General Mills was able to cut the time workers changed a production line for a Betty Crocker product from 4.5 hours to just 12 minutes by adapting ideas in efficiency and high performance from a NASCAR pit crew working at blinding speed.© Bob Jordan/AP Photo

4. Motivation through Mutual Accountability and Interdependence

Do you work harder when you’re alone or when you’re in a group? When clear performance goals exist, when the work is considered meaningful, when members believe their efforts matter, and when they don’t feel they are being exploited by others—this kind of culture supports teamwork. 56  Being mutually accountable to other members of the team rather than to a supervisor makes members feel mutual trust and commitment—a key part in motivating members for team effort. Mutual accountability is fostered by having team “members share accountability for the work, authority over how goals are met, discretion over resource use, and ownership of information and knowledge related to the work.”57

Do you like it when your performance is contingent on someone else’s efforts? Your answer reflects your experience with team member interdependence.  Team member interdependence  reveals the extent to which team members rely on common task-related team inputs, such as resources, information, goals, and rewards, and the amount of interpersonal interactions needed to complete the work. 58  A recent study of over 7,000 teams showed that interdependence affects team functioning, which in turn influences team performance.59 The key takeaway from this study is reinforcement of the need for team leaders to monitor the quality of team member interdependence.  

5. Team Composition 

Team composition reflects the collection of jobs, personalities, values, knowledge, experience, and skills of team members. The concept is related to our discussion of workforce diversity in  Chapter 11 . You learned that diversity is good for business and that it must be effectively managed. The same is true for team composition.60

For example, a recent study examining the characteristics of effective teams at Cisco found that one of the top three such qualities was members’ conviction that their values were shared.61 This is a feeling you’ve probably experienced as a member of a team or club built around common interests.

The most important idea to remember is that team member composition should fit the responsibilities of the team. Fit enhances effectiveness and misfit impedes it.62 Let’s consider a few examples.

Teams perform better when members have a high tolerance for uncertainty (a personality trait) during the early stages of team development (forming and storming). This same finding applies to self-managed and virtual teams, due to their relative lack of imposed direction and face-to-face communication. 63  Team research also shows that teams with members who possess high levels of openness or emotional stability deal with task conflict better than those without these composition characteristics. 64  Finally, in the university context, top management teams (presidents, vice presidents, and chancellors) who were more diverse in terms of educational and disciplinary backgrounds generated more funding for research and improved school reputations.65

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6. Roles: How Team Members Are Expected to Behave

Roles  are socially determined expectations of how individuals should behave in a specific position. As a team member, your role is to play a part in helping the team reach its goals. Members develop their roles based on the expectations of the team, of the organization, and of themselves, and they may do different things. You, for instance, might be a team leader. Others might do some of the work tasks. Still others might communicate with other teams. 66

Two types of team roles are task and maintenance. (See  Table 13.2 .)

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Task Roles: Getting the Work Done

A  task role, or task-oriented role, consists of behavior that concentrates on getting the team’s tasks done. Task roles keep the team on track and get the work done. If you stand up in a team meeting and say, “What is the real issue here? We don’t seem to be getting anywhere,” you are performing a task role.

Examples: Coordinators, who pull together ideas and suggestions; orienters, who keep teams headed toward their stated goals; initiators, who suggest new goals or ideas; and energizers, who prod people to move along or accomplish more are all playing task roles.

Maintenance Roles: Keeping the Team Together

A  maintenance role, or relationship-oriented role, consists of behavior that fosters constructive relationships among team members. Maintenance roles focus on keeping team members. If someone at a team meeting says, “Let’s hear from those who oppose this plan,” he or she is playing a maintenance role.

Examples are encouragers, who foster group solidarity by praising various viewpoints; standard setters, who evaluate the quality of group processes; harmonizers, who mediate conflict through reconciliation or humor; and compromisers, who help resolve conflict by meeting others “halfway.”

TABLE 13.2  Task and Maintenance Roles

TASK ROLES	DESCRIPTION
Initiator	Suggests new goals or ideas
Information seeker/giver	Clarifies key issues
Opinion seeker/giver	Clarifies pertinent values
Elaborator	Promotes greater understanding through examples or exploration of implications
Coordinator	Pulls together ideas and suggestions
Orienter	Keeps group headed toward its stated goal(s)
Evaluator	Tests group’s accomplishments with various criteria such as logic and practicality
Energizer	Prods group to move along or to accomplish more
Procedural technician	Performs routine duties (handing out materials or rearranging seats)
Recorder	Performs a “group memory” function by documenting discussion and outcomes
MAINTENANCE ROLES	DESCRIPTION
Encourager	Fosters group solidarity by accepting and praising various points of view
Harmonizer	Mediates conflict through reconciliation or humor
Compromiser	Helps resolve conflict by meeting others halfway
Gatekeeper	Encourages all group members to participate
Standard setter	Evaluates the quality of group processes
Commentator	Records and comments on group processes/dynamics
Follower	Serves as a passive audience

Adapted from discussion in K. D. Benne and P. Sheats, “Functional Roles of Group Members,” Journal of Social Issues, Spring 1948, 41–49.

7. Norms: Unwritten Rules for Team Members

Norms are more encompassing than roles.  Norms  are general guidelines or rules of behavior that most group or team members follow. Norms point out the boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. 67  Although some norms can be made explicit, typically they are unwritten and seldom discussed openly; nevertheless, they have a powerful influence on group and organizational behavior.

Why Norms Are Enforced: Four Reasons

Norms tend to be enforced by group or team members for four reasons: 68

· To help the group survive—“Don’t do anything that will hurt us.” Norms are enforced to help the group, team, or organization survive.

Example: The manager of your team or group might compliment you because you’ve made sure it has the right emergency equipment.

· To clarify role expectations—“You have to go along to get along.” Norms are also enforced to help clarify or simplify role expectations.

Example: At one time, new members of Congress wanting to buck the system by which important committee appointments were given to those with the most seniority were advised to “go along to get along”—go along with the rules in order to get along in their congressional careers.

· To help individuals avoid embarrassing situations—“Don’t call attention to yourself.” Norms are enforced to help group or team members avoid embarrassing themselves.

Examples: You might be ridiculed by fellow team members for dominating the discussion during a report to top management (“Be a team player, not a show-off”). Or you might be told not to discuss religion or politics with customers, whose views might differ from yours.

· To emphasize the group’s important values and identity—“We’re known for being special.” Finally, norms are enforced to emphasize the group’s, team’s, or organization’s central values or to enhance its unique identity.

Examples: Nordstrom’s department store chain emphasizes the great lengths to which it goes in customer service. Some colleges give an annual award to the instructor whom students vote best teacher.

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PRACTICAL ACTION

How to Build a High-Performing Team

High-Performing Teams at Cisco. Francine Katsoudas is the senior vice president and chief people officer at Cisco. Her top suggestions for building a high-performing team, based on a recent survey by the company, are the following:69 

· Focus on team members’ individual strengths.

· Let every member know his or her values are shared.

·  Building on the first two suggestions, ensure a psychologically safe work environment characterized by trust.

Practicing Camaraderie. Mike Tomlin, head coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers, advises letting team members periodically spend time together having fun. Each year the Steelers spend a day together, playing arcade games at Dave and Buster’s and acting like kids to build camaraderie.70

Taking Risks and Coming Together. Finally, the team that put together the Volt, GM’s new electric car, says team success comes from the ability to take risks. With low production numbers, the team faced only moderate expectations and was able to work with fewer supplies, manage just one production plant, bend a few rules, and develop fast and nimble strategies for getting the job done. Exceeding their original mileage goal for the car, says chief engineer Andrew Farah, was “less about authority and more about cooperating and figuring out how to take on risk.”71

YOUR CALL

How well do you think an organization could incorporate all the suggestions listed here for creating high-performance teams? What other strategies do you think contribute to outstanding team results?

Putting It All Together 

Thus far in this chapter we have considered the things that make groups and teams both effective and ineffective. We hope you understand creating and leading a high performance team takes planning and skill. The first step in improving a team’s performance, however, involves an assessment of its effectiveness.

So how can you determine whether a team is effective? A group’s output surely is one indicator, but there are others that are more “process-oriented.” You can get an idea of these process-oriented indicators by taking  Self-Assessment 13.3 . ●

SELF-ASSESSMENT 13.3  

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13.4

Managing Conflict

MAJOR QUESTION Since conflict is a part of life, what should a manager know about it in order to deal successfully with it?

THE BIG PICTURE

Conflict, an enduring feature of the workplace, is a process in which one party perceives that its interests are being opposed or negatively affected by another party. Conflict can be negative (bad) or functional (good). Indeed, either too much or too little conflict can affect performance. This section identifies four sources of conflict in organizations and describes four ways to stimulate constructive conflict.

Mistakes, pressure-cooker deadlines, increased workloads, demands for higher productivity, and other kinds of stress—all contribute to on-the-job conflict. 72  Most people envision conflict as meaning shouting and fighting, but as a manager you will encounter more subtle, nonviolent forms: opposition, criticism, arguments. Thus, a definition of conflict seems fairly mild:  Conflict  is a process in which one party perceives that its interests are being opposed or negatively affected by another party. 73

Conflict is a natural aspect of life. A place to begin our discussion of conflict is for you to learn about your tendencies for conflicts with others. Do you see yourself as easy to get along with and relatively conflict free, which may be true? Let’s consider your self-perceptions by completing  Self-Assessment 13.4 .

SELF-ASSESSMENT 13.4  

Interpersonal Conflict Tendencies 

If your instructor has assigned Self-Assessment 13.4 in Connect, you will learn how well you get along with others at work and/or school.

1. Does your score match your perception of yourself?

2. The assessment measures how well you get along with others and how they treat you; both are sources of conflict. If you were to improve the measure, what other factors do you think should be included?

The Nature of Conflict: Disagreement Is Normal

Conflict is simply disagreement, a perfectly normal state of affairs. Conflicts may take many forms: between individuals, between an individual and a group, between groups, within a group, and between an organization and its environment.

Although all of us might wish to live lives free of conflict, it is now recognized that certain kinds of conflict can actually be beneficial. Let us therefore distinguish between dysfunctional conflict (bad) and functional conflict (good).

· Dysfunctional conflict—bad for organizations. From the standpoint of the organization,  dysfunctional conflict  is conflict that hinders the organization’s performance or threatens its interests. As a manager, you need to do what you can to remove dysfunctional conflict, sometimes called negative conflict.

· Functional conflict—good for organizations. The good kind of conflict is  functional conflict, which benefits the main purposes of the organization and serves its interests. 74  There are some situations in which this kind of conflict—also called constructive conflict or cooperative conflict—is considered advantageous.

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  EXAMPLE

Dysfunctional and Functional Conflict: Do Nasty Bosses Get Better Performance?

A recent study by Career Builder found that 45% of workplace bullies are bosses, and an additional 25% are higher executives (the rest are peers). Their behavior ranges from threats, humiliation, and intimidation to taking credit for other people’s work and even committing acts of workplace sabotage.75 

Unfortunately, this kind of tyranny is very common. Research conducted by the Workplace Bullying Institute estimates that 27% of the U.S. workforce has been bullied. Another 21% has witnessed bullying. All told, then, nearly half the U.S. workforce has been exposed to bullying. Interestingly, the majority of bullies are men (about 60%), and women are bullied more than men.76 

Abuse Flows Downhill. Does such negative conflict get results? Surprisingly, often it does. One study of 373 randomly chosen employees found that, although some reacted to abusive bosses by doing little or nothing, others performed better—in part, it’s speculated, to make themselves look good and others look worse. 77

The jerk. Ever worked for an angry boss? How did you deal with the situation? Have there been circumstances in which people working for you might have called you a jerk (or worse)? What should you have done differently?© John Lund/Nevada Wier/Blend Images/Corbis RF

Yet other research shows that abuse flows downhill, and when supervisors feel they have been unjustly treated, they may vent their resentment by abusing those who report to them. Subordinates generally cope either through avoidance or, less commonly, through confrontation and are in any case less inclined to feel committed to their organizations, to speak unfavorably about their companies to outsiders, and to seek jobs elsewhere. 78

The “No-Jerk Rule.” When Stanford organizational psychologist Robert Sutton published a short essay in which he urged more civility in organizations by steady application of what he calls “the no-jerk rule” (although he used a far stronger word than “jerk”), he elicited more e-mails than he had received on any other subject, showing the topic had touched a nerve. 79

Options for dealing with a bullying boss include documenting the incidents to be sure there is a pattern of abusive behavior, investigating your organization’s policy on bullying and any consequences for the bully, and reporting offensive behavior to a higher-level executive. You can try not to react in the moment, to avoid giving the bully the satisfaction he or she seeks, or you can speak out as calmly and rationally as you can.80  

YOUR CALL

Have you ever worked for jerks (otherwise known, as Sutton puts it, as “tyrants, bullies, boors, destructive narcissists, and psychologically abusive people”)? How did you respond to them?

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Can Too Little or Too Much Conflict Affect Performance?

It’s tempting to think that a conflict-free work group is a happy work group, as indeed it may be. But is it a productive group? In the 1970s, social scientists specializing in organizational behavior introduced the revolutionary idea that organizations could suffer from too little or too much conflict. Neither scenario is good.

· Too little conflict—indolence. Work groups, departments, or organizations that experience too little conflict tend to be plagued by apathy, lack of creativity, indecision, and missed deadlines. The result is that organizational performance suffers.

· Too much conflict—warfare. Excessive conflict, on the other hand, can erode organizational performance because of political infighting, dissatisfaction, lack of teamwork, and turnover. Workplace aggression and violence are manifestations of excessive conflict. 81

Thus, it seems that a moderate level of conflict can induce creativity and initiative,82 thereby raising performance, as shown in the diagram below. (See  Figure 13.3 .) 83  As you might expect, however, what constitutes “moderate” will vary among managers.

FIGURE 13.3  The relationship between intensity of conflict and performance outcomes Too little conflict or too much conflict causes performance to suffer.Source: Derived from L. D. Brown, Managing Conflict at Organizational Interfaces (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1983).

Four Kinds of Conflict: Personality, Intergroup, Cross-Cultural, and Work–Family

There are a variety of sources of conflict—so-called conflict triggers. Four of the principal ones are (1) between personalities, (2) between groups, (3) between cultures, and (4) between work and family responsibilities. By understanding these, you’ll be better able to take charge and manage the conflicts rather than letting the conflicts take you by surprise and manage you.

1. Personality Conflicts: Clashes Because of Personal Dislikes or Disagreements

We’ve all had confrontations, weak or strong, with people because we disagreed with them or disliked their personalities, such as their opinions, their behavior, their looks, whatever.  Personality conflict  is defined as interpersonal opposition based on personal dislike or disagreement. Such conflicts often begin with instances of workplace incivility, or employees’ lack of regard for each other, which, if not curtailed, can diminish job satisfaction and team work engagement. 84  Unfortunately, personality conflicts are quite common. Recent research reports that 98% of employees reported experiencing some form of incivility, and 50% said they had been treated rudely at least once a week!

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EXAMPLE

“What We’ve Got Here Is a Failure to Communicate”: The Plight of the Tongue-Tied

Miscommunication happens for all kinds of reasons—sometimes because there is no communication at all.

Clamming Up in Small Groups. Some people simply clam up in small-group settings, often because they think others are smarter or of higher status. Becoming tongue-tied this way seems to be more common in women and in people with higher IQs, according to a Virginia Tech study. 85  The researchers speculate they are “more attuned to group social dynamics, subconsciously worrying about their performance and evaluating themselves in relation to others,” says one report. 86

Ways to Cope. If speaking up is hard for you to do in small groups, you can take comfort that the people who froze the most in the study were actually the smartest. Otherwise, you can cope by preparing before the meeting (practice your delivery and bring notes), telling the person running the meeting beforehand that you have some points and would like the opportunity to be called upon, or joining with a more outgoing or higher-status member in the group who can bring up your points and then toss you an opening.87

YOUR CALL

Do you tend to go silent during some small-group settings or social situations? Perhaps it’s not that you’re shy but rather an introvert and want to collect your thoughts before speaking—hard to do in the company of extroverts who “think out loud.” Could any of this advice work for you?

2. Intergroup Conflicts: Clashes among Work Groups, Teams, and Departments

The downside of collaboration, or the “we” feeling discussed earlier, is that it can translate into “we versus them.” This produces conflict among work groups, teams, and departments within an organization.

Some ways in which intergroup conflicts are expressed are as follows:

· Inconsistent goals or reward systems—when people pursue different objectives. It’s natural for people in functional organizations to be pursuing different objectives and to be rewarded accordingly, but this means that conflict is practically built into the system.

· Ambiguous jurisdictions—when job boundaries are unclear. “That’s not my job and those aren’t my responsibilities.” “Those resources belong to me because I need them as part of my job.” When task responsibilities are unclear, that can often lead to conflict.

· Status differences—when there are inconsistencies in power and influence. It can happen that people who are lower in status according to the organization chart actually have disproportionate power over those theoretically above them, which can lead to conflicts.

3. Multicultural Conflicts: Clashes between Cultures

With cross-border mergers, joint ventures, and international alliances common features of the global economy, there are frequent opportunities for clashes between cultures. Often success or failure, when business is being conducted across cultures, arises from dealing with differing assumptions about how to think and act.

One study of 409 expatriates (14% of them female) working for U.S. and Canadian multinational firms in 51 countries identified nine specific ways to facilitate interaction with host-country nationals, the results of which are shown at left. (See  Table 13.3 .) Note that “Be a good listener” tops the list—the very thing lacking in so many U.S. managers, who are criticized for being blunt to the point of insensitivity. 88

TABLE 13.3  Ways to Build Cross-Cultural Relationships

1. Be a good listener.

2. Be sensitive to others’ needs.

3. Be cooperative, not overly competitive.

4. Advocate inclusive (participative) leadership.

5. Compromise rather than dominate.

6. Build rapport through conversations.

7. Be compassionate and understanding.

8. Avoid conflict by emphasizing harmony.

9. Nurture others (develop and mentor).

Source: Adapted from R. L. Tung, “American Expatriates Abroad: From Neophytes to Cosmopolitans,” Journal of World Business, Summer 1998, table 6, p. 136.

4. Work–Family Conflicts

Work–family conflict  occurs when the demands or pressures from work and family domains are mutually incompatible. 89  Work and family canPage 455 conflict in two ways: Work responsibilities can interfere with family life, and family demands can interfere with work responsibilities. 90

For instance, an employee who is caring for an aging mother skips a department meeting to take his mother to a doctor’s appointment (family interferes with work). Perhaps another day he works late to finish a report on time and has to reschedule his mother’s follow-up appointment (work interferes with family).

Both these types of conflicts matter, because their effects spill over both at home and at work, as  Table 13.4  shows. Research also tells us that work interferes with family far more often than family does with work and is the more serious problem of the two.91

TABLE 13.4 NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES OF CONFLICTS AMONG WORK, FAMILY, AND OTHER LIFE DOMAINS

WORK INTERFERES WITH FAMILY	FAMILY INTERFERES  WITH WORK	OUTCOMES LINKED TO LIFE MORE GENERALLY
Job satisfaction	Marital satisfaction	Life satisfaction
Intentions to quit	Family satisfaction	Health problems
Absenteeism	Family-related strain	Depression
Job performance	Family-related performance	Substance use/abuse

Source: Adapted from F. T. Amstad, L. L. Meier, U. Fasel, A. Elfering, and N. K. Semmer, “A Meta-Analysis of Work-Family Conflict and Various Outcomes with a Special Emphasis on Cross-Domain versus Matching Domain Relations,” Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 2011, Vol. 16, No. 2, 151–169.

PRACTICAL ACTION

Identifying Companies with Good Work–Family Balance 

What do you want in a job? A recent report by consulting firm Deloitte shows that Millennials value their personal lives more highly than they do organizational goals or corporate reputations. It’s not surprising, then, that good work–life balance was the quality Millennials wanted most in a job; flexible hours and a sense of meaning were close behind.92 

The job search site Indeed.com recently compiled a list of the top 25 companies for good work–life balance.93 Among them were Colgate-Palmolive, Wegmans supermarket chain, the brokerage Coldwell Banker, H&R Block, Google, Nokia, Philips Electronics, Johnson & Johnson, Disney, Prudential Financial, and the YWCA. A study of the worst employers to work for, in which poor work–life balance featured heavily, was based on data from Glassdoor, the employer rating site.94 Leading this list were companies including CVS, Dollar General, DISH Network, Sears, Xerox, Forever 21, and Kmart. 

If you are more interested in scoping out a particular career’s potential for work–life balance than an individual employer’s, a study by GOBankingRates95 found that the professions where work–life balance is most respected include data scientists, graphic designer, elementary school teacher, social media manager, hair stylist, and dietitian. However, some experts say working long hours indicates people really love their jobs. In that light, consider these careers in which work–life balance takes a back seat: surgeon, lawyer, massage therapist, nurse, general manager, firefighter, airline pilot, and journalist. 

If you’re wondering how to find out where a company stands on work–life balance before you take the job, here’s a tip: Schedule your job interview early in the morning or late in the day and observe how many people are at their desks outside normal working hours.96  

YOUR CALL

Some companies say it’s the employee’s responsibility to keep his or her work and life in an appropriate balance, and some employees who don’t have children feel workplace policies meant to offer flexibility to parents of young children are unfair, since everyone can’t take advantage of them. Do you think such policies are fair? Are they necessary? If you agree that employees should take charge of their own work–life balance, how should they do so? 

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How to Stimulate Constructive Conflict

As a manager you are being paid not just to manage conflict but even to create some, where it’s constructive and appropriate, in order to stimulate performance. Constructive conflict, if carefully monitored, can be very productive under a number of circumstances: when your work group seems afflicted with inertia and apathy, resulting in low performance; when there’s a lack of new ideas and resistance to change; when there seem to be a lot of yes-men and yes-women (expressing groupthink) in the work unit; when there’s high employee turnover; or when managers seem unduly concerned with peace, cooperation, compromise, consensus, and their own popularity rather than in achieving work objectives.

The following four strategies are used to stimulate constructive conflict.

1. Spur Competition among Employees

Competition is, of course, a form of conflict, but competition is often healthy in spurring people to produce higher results. Thus, a company will often put its salespeople in competition with one another by offering bonuses and awards for achievement—a trip to a Caribbean resort, say, for the top performer of the year.

2. Change the Organization’s Culture and Procedures

Competition may also be established by making deliberate and highly publicized moves to change the corporate culture—by announcing to employees that the organization is now going to be more innovative and reward original thinking and unorthodox ideas. Procedures, such as paperwork sign-off processes, can also be revamped. Results can be reinforced in visible ways through announcements of bonuses, raises, and promotions.

3. Bring In Outsiders for New Perspectives

Without “new blood,” organizations can become inbred and resistant to change. This is why managers often bring in outsiders—people from a different unit of the organization, new hires from competing companies, or consultants. With their different backgrounds, attitudes, or management styles, these outsiders can bring a new perspective and can shake things up.

4. Use Programmed Conflict: Devil’s Advocacy and the Dialectic Method

Programmed conflict  is designed to elicit different opinions without inciting people’s personal feelings.  Sometimes decision-making groups become so bogged down in details and procedures that nothing of substance gets done. The idea here is to get people, through role-playing, to defend or criticize ideas based on relevant facts rather than on personal feelings and preferences.

Top employee. Companies frequently stimulate constructive competition among employees to produce better performance. Top salespeople, for instance, may be rewarded with a trip to a resort. Do you think you would do well in a company that makes you compete with others to produce higher results?© Tony Tallec/Alamy RFPage 457

The method for getting people to engage in this debate of ideas is to do disciplined role-playing, for which two proven methods are available: devil’s advocacy and the dialectic method. These two methods work as follows:

· Devil’s advocacy—role-playing criticism to test whether a proposal is workable.  Devil’s advocacy  is the process of assigning someone to play the role of critic to voice possible objections to a proposal and thereby generate critical thinking and reality testing.

Periodically role-playing devil’s advocate has a beneficial side effect in that it is great training for developing analytical and communicative skills. However, it’s a good idea to rotate the job so no one person develops a negative reputation.

· The dialectic method—role-playing two sides of a proposal to test whether it is workable. Requiring a bit more skill training than devil’s advocacy does, the  dialectic method  is the process of having two people or groups play opposing roles in a debate in order to better understand a proposal. After the structured debate, managers are more equipped to make an intelligent decision. 97

Five Basic Behaviors to Help You Better Handle Conflict

Whatever kind of organization you work for, you’ll always benefit from knowing how to manage conflict. There are five basic behaviors that enable you to work on disagreements and keep them from flaring into out-of-control personality conflicts: openness, equality, empathy, supportiveness, and positiveness. 98

1. Openness

State your views openly and honesty, not trying to disguise the real object of your disagreement. Look at the conflict as a way to better understand the situation and find a solution. Concentrate on identifying the problem and taking a problem-solving approach.

2. Equality

Treat the other’s status and ideas as equal to yours, allowing that person time to completely express his or her opinions. Evaluate all ideas fairly and logically, without regard to ownership.

3. Empathy

Try to experience the other person’s feelings and point of view, showing you are truly listening by using such expressions as “I appreciate how you feel. …”

4. Supportiveness

Let the other person know you want to find a resolution that will benefit you both. Describe the specifics you have difficulty understanding, without evaluating or judging them. Support the other person’s position when it makes sense to do so.

5. Positiveness

Be positive about the other person and your relationship. Express your willingness to work toward a resolution that will be feasible for everyone.

Before beginning to try to adopt these behaviors preparatory to dealing with a dispute, you should also try to be aware of your customary conflict-handling style. 

Dealing with Disagreements: Five Conflict-Handling Styles

Even if you’re at the top of your game as a manager, working with groups and teams of people will now and then put you in the middle of disagreements, sometimes even destructive conflict. How can you deal with it?

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There are five conflict-handling styles, or techniques, a manager can use for handling disagreements with individuals: avoiding, accommodating, forcing, compromising, and problem solving. 99

Avoiding—“Maybe the Problem Will Go Away”

Avoiding is ignoring or suppressing a conflict. Avoidance is appropriate for trivial issues, when emotions are high and a cooling-off period is needed, or when the cost of confrontation outweighs the benefits of resolving the conflict. It is not appropriate for difficult or worsening problems.

The benefit of this approach is that it buys time in unfolding and ambiguous situations. The weakness is that it provides only a temporary fix and sidesteps the underlying problem.

Accommodating—“Let’s Do It Your Way”

An accommodating manager is also known as a “smoothing” or “obliging” manager. Accommodating is allowing the desires of the other party to prevail. As one writer describes it, “An obliging [accommodating] person neglects his or her own concern to satisfy the concern of the other party.” 100  Accommodating may be an appropriate conflict-handling strategy when it’s possible to eventually get something in return or when the issue isn’t important to you. It’s not appropriate for complex or worsening problems.

The advantage of accommodating is that it encourages cooperation. The weakness is that once again it’s only a temporary fix that fails to confront the underlying problem.

Forcing—“We Have to Do It My Way”

Also known as “dominating,” forcing is simply ordering an outcome, when a manager relies on his or her formal authority and power to resolve a conflict, but the needs of the other party are largely ignored. Forcing is appropriate when an unpopular solution must be implemented and when it’s not important that others be committed to your viewpoint.

The advantage of forcing is speed: It can get results quickly. The disadvantage is that in the end it doesn’t resolve personal conflict—if anything, it aggravates it by breeding hurt feelings and resentment.

Compromising—“Let’s Split the Difference”

In compromising, both parties give up something in order to gain something. Compromise is appropriate when both sides have opposite goals or possess equal power. But compromise isn’t workable when it is used so often that it doesn’t achieve results—for example, continual failure to meet production deadlines. Compromise, says one writer, sometimes represents “the mistaken idea that any agreement is better than no agreement.” 101

The benefit of compromise is that it is a democratic process that seems to have no losers. However, since so many people approach compromise situations with a win–lose attitude, they may be disappointed and feel cheated.

Collaborating—“Let’s Cooperate to Reach a Win–Win Solution That Benefits Both of Us”

Problem solving, or integrating, is about collaboration. In this style, the manager strives to confront the issue and cooperatively identify the problem, generating and weighing alternatives and selecting a solution. Problem solving is appropriate for complex issues plagued by misunderstanding. It is inappropriate for resolving conflicts rooted in opposing value systems.

The strength of problem solving is its longer-lasting impact because it deals with the underlying problem, not just its symptoms. Its weakness is that it’s very time-consuming. Nevertheless, problem solving is usually the best approach for dealing with groups and teams of people.

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PRACTICAL ACTION

Wringing Creativity from Conflict 

What if your group is experiencing workplace conflict and is stuck for creative solutions to a problem? Can conflict help you find your way out? Some experts say conflict can indeed drive creativity. Here are some suggestions for doing just that.102

Ask the right questions about the problem. Sometimes conflict distorts what the group’s real task is. Test your assumptions and make sure you’ve correctly framed the issue before the group.

Actively draw input from all members.  If someone hasn’t spoken up yet, or someone’s ideas are often disregarded because they are a little off the wall, make sure those members have a chance to speak. When they get a hearing, others will chime in, too.

Work with the resources you have.  The great American conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein once said, “To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.”103 

Keep a dialogue going, not a debate. A debate has only two sides; you want to hear as many sides and ideas as possible. To avoid polarizing a discussion and forcing group members to face off, check your emotions.

Reward nonconformity. The unusual, the offbeat, the “we never tried that before” ideas can lead you to creative solutions. Sir Ken Robinson, an expert on creativity, says, “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” 104

Don’t try too hard to smooth the way between group members.  When group members have to work out their own interpersonal differences, they often come up with more genuine ways of doing so that can fire up their creativity in other areas.

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14.1

The Nature of Leadership: The Role of Power and Influence

MAJOR QUESTION How do effective leaders use power and influence?

THE BIG PICTURE

Leadership skills are needed to create and communicate a company’s vision, strategies, and goals as well as to execute on these plans and goals. This section highlights the way successful managers use power and influence to achieve these ends and describes five sources of power and nine influence tactics they use to lead others. Leaders use the power of persuasion to get others to follow them. Five approaches to leadership are described in the next five sections.

Leadership. What is it? Is it a skill anyone can develop? How important is it to organizational success?

Leadership  is the ability to influence employees to voluntarily pursue organizational goals. 4  Although not everyone is suited to being a good leader, evidence shows that people can be trained to be more effective leaders. In response, more companies are using management development programs to build a pipeline of leadership talent. Total U.S. spending by organizations for leadership training was $61.8 billion in 2014 and $70.6 billion in 2015.5 

Effective leadership matters! A recent study spanning 60 years and more than 18,000 firm-years showed that CEO behavior significantly impacted organizational performance. 6  Don’t take this study to mean effective leadership only matters at the top. Other research reinforces the value of fostering effective leadership at all organizational levels. 

Global leaders. Leadership impacts the security, sustainability, and well-being of our planet. These leaders of the Group of 20 major economies clearly impact our lives in many ways. The purpose of the meeting taking place here was to determine how advanced and emerging economies can create mutually beneficial growth strategies.© Kyodo News/Getty Images

Let’s begin our study of leadership by considering the role of power and influence skills and the difference between leading and managing.

Five Sources of Power

Power  is the ability to marshal human, informational, and other resources to get something done.  Defined this way, power is all about influencing others. The more influence you have, the more powerful you are, and vice versa. 

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To really understand leadership, we need to understand the concept of power and authority. Authority is the right to perform or command; it comes with the job. In contrast, power is the extent to which a person is able to influence others so they respond to orders.

People who pursue  personalized power—power directed at helping oneself—as a way of enhancing their own selfish ends may give the word power a bad name. However, there is another kind of power,  socialized power—power directed at helping others. This is the kind of power you hear in expressions such as “My goal is to have a powerful impact on my community.”7

Within organizations there are typically five sources of power leaders may draw on: legitimate, reward, coercive, expert, and referent.

1. Legitimate Power: Influencing Behavior Because of One’s Formal Position

Legitimate power, which all managers have, is power that results from managers’ formal positions within the organization. All managers have legitimate power over their employees, deriving from their position, whether it’s a construction boss, ad account supervisor, sales manager, or CEO. This power may be exerted both positively or negatively—as praise or as criticism, for example.

2. Reward Power: Influencing Behavior by Promising or Giving Rewards

Reward power, which all managers have, is power that results from managers’ authority to reward their subordinates. Rewards can range from praise to pay raises, from recognition to promotions.

Example: GoFanbase, a company that helps other firms manage social media, offers employees a $20 “idea bounty” if they present ideas in meetings that their peers agree are worthwhile and the founder approves. Unlimited vacation time and paid time off for volunteering are other, increasingly popular incentives.8

3. Coercive Power: Influencing Behavior by Threatening or Giving Punishment

Coercive power, which all managers have, results from managers’ authority to punish their subordinates. Punishment can range from verbal or written reprimands to demotions to terminations. In some lines of work, fines and suspensions may be used. Coercive power has to be used judiciously, of course, since a manager who is seen as being constantly negative will produce a lot of resentment among employees. Before Alan Mulally took over at Ford Motor Co., for instance, the expectation fostered by a culture of blame at the firm was that any manager who had bad news to report would be fired. Mulally’s corrective action was to say a manager had a problem, not that he or she was the problem.9 

4. Expert Power: Influencing Behavior Because of One’s Expertise

Expert power is power resulting from one’s specialized information or expertise. Expertise, or special knowledge, can be mundane, such as knowing the work schedules and assignments of the people who report to you. Or it can be sophisticated, such as having computer or medical knowledge. Secretaries may have expert power because, for example, they have been in a job a long time and know all the necessary contacts. CEOs may have expert power because they have strategic knowledge not shared by many others.

5. Referent Power: Influencing Behavior Because of One’s Personal Attraction

Referent power is power deriving from one’s personal attraction. As we will see later in this chapter (under the discussion of transformational leadership,  Section 14.5 ), this kind of power characterizes strong, visionary leaders who are able to persuade their followers by dint of their personality, attitudes, or background. Referent power may be associated with managers, but it is more likely to be characteristic of leaders.

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Now that you’ve learned about the five bases of power, complete  Self-Assessment 14.1  to identify which bases you prefer to use. Answering the associated questions will help you understand how the various forms of power can both help and hurt you when trying to influence others.

SELF-ASSESSMENT 14.1  

What Kind of Power Do I Prefer?

If your instructor has assigned  Self-Assessment 14.1  in Connect, you will learn which bases of power you prefer to use. 

1. Which of the five bases of power do you prefer to use?

2. Describe how this form of power helps you at school, at work, and in social situations.

3. Which of the five bases is your least preferred? What are the implications for you at school, at work, and in social situations?

4. What two specific things can you do to increase your expert power? Two things to increase your referent power?

Common Influence Tactics

Influence tactics  are conscious efforts to affect and change behaviors in others. The nine most common ways people try to get their bosses, coworkers, and subordinates to do what they want are listed in  Table 14.1 , beginning with the most frequently used.

TABLE 14.1   Nine Common Influence Tactics

INFLUENCE TACTIC	DESCRIPTION	EXAMPLE
1. Rational persuasion	Trying to convince someone with reason, logic, or facts	As CEO, Allan Mullally reversed the negative meeting culture at Ford Motor Co.—and its financial fortunes—by encouraging open and honest discussion and collaboration focused on finding solutions rather than placing blame.10
2. Inspirational appeals	Trying to build enthusiasm by appealing to others’ emotions, ideals, or values	The late Steve Jobs’s understanding that people want to fulfill their dreams, not just purchase products, continues to inform every design and marketing decision at Apple, the company he founded.11
3. Consultation	Getting others to participate in planning, decision making, and changes	“I end up asking a lot of questions,” says Nike’s CEO, Mark Parker. Known for encouraging and seeking ideas from even junior members of management, Parker deliberately avoids a micro managing style.12
4. Ingratiation	Getting someone in a good mood prior to making a request	This is being friendly and helpful and using praise, flattery, or humor. A particular form of ingratiation is “brown nosing.”13
5. Personal appeals	Referring to friendship and loyalty when making a request, asking a friend to do a favor	Employees who volunteer might make a personal appeal to colleagues to donate time, clothing, or money to a cause.14
6. Exchange	Making explicit or implied promises and trading favors	Leaders must be careful not to allow favoritism and coercion to evolve, however.15
7. Coalition tactics	Getting others to support your efforts to persuade someone	Cory Booker, U.S. Senator from New Jersey, credits coalition leadership with the economic revival of Newark during his past job as mayor: “None of these accomplishments happened because of one individual’s effort. They happened because, in Newark, we brought together new coalitions of grassroots neighborhood groups and elected leaders, nonprofits and business groups, labor unions and leaders in the capital markets, developers and philanthropists. I am proud of the unity that was forged in Newark—it’s proof, to me, that people will rally around bold goals and, in turn, achieve significant progress.”16
8. Pressure	Demanding compliance or using intimidation or threats	Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu wrote, “The highest type of ruler is one of whose existence the people are barely aware. Next comes one whom they love and praise. Next comes one whom they fear. Next comes one whom they despise and defy.”17
9. Legitimating tactics	Basing a request on authority or right, organizational rules or policies, or explicit/implied support from superiors	The assertive style of Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida and a one-time contender for the Republican presidential nomination, was based on his deep understanding of the use of executive authority.18

See D. Kipnis, S. Schmidt, and I. Wilkinson, “Intraorganizational Influence Tactics: Exploration in Getting One’s Way,” Journal of Applied Psychology, August 1980, pp. 440–452; and Table 1 in G. Yukl, C. M. Falbe, and J. Y. Youn, “Patterns of Influence Behavior for Managers,” Group & Organization Management, March 1993, pp. 5–28.

These are considered generic influence tactics because they characterize social influence as we use it in all directions. Research has also shown this ranking to be fairly consistent regardless of whether the direction of influence is downward, upward, or lateral.

Hard versus Soft Tactics

Some refer to the first five influence tactics—rational persuasion, inspirational appeals, consultation, ingratiation, and personal appeals—as “soft” tactics because they are friendlier than, and not as coercive as, the last four tactics—exchange, coalition, pressure, and legitimating tactics, which are “hard” tactics because they exert more overt pressure.

Influence tactics. In mid-2015 Taylor Swift asserted her immense power and influence and successfully changed one of Apple’s policies. Before the launch of Apple Music, the company said it intended not to compensate musicians for their music used during the free trial of its new subscription service. Swift, who often speaks on behalf of other musicians, threatened to withhold her new album from Apple, now the largest single retailer of music. She said, “We don’t ask for free iPhones. Please don’t ask us to provide you with our music for no compensation.” Apple quickly changed its policy and compensated musicians for the use of their work during the free trial and since. Which tactics (and bases of power) did Swift use to influence Apple?

© Mike Coppola/Getty ImagesPage 469

Which Influence Tactics Do You Prefer?

When you read the list of tactics, each probably meant something to you. Which do you most commonly use? Knowing the answer can help you better choose the appropriate tactic for any given situation and thus increase the chance of achieving your desired outcome. The next step to realizing these benefits is to complete  Self-Assessment 14.2 .

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SELF-ASSESSMENT 14.2  

Which Influence Tactics Do I Use? 

If your instructor has assigned  Self-Assessment 14.2  in Connect, you will learn which of the nine influence tactics you use and in what order of frequency.

1. Is your rational persuasion score the highest? Regardless, give some specific examples of ways you use this tactic.

2. Which tactic is your least preferred (lowest score)? Provide examples of situations when and how you may use this tactic.

Match Tactics to Influence Outcomes

Research and practice provide some useful lessons about the relative effectiveness of influence tactics.

· Rely on the core. Core influence tactics—rational persuasion, consultation, collaboration, and inspirational appeals—are most effective at building commitment. 

· Be authentic. Don’t try to be someone else. Be authentic to your values and beliefs.

· Consult rather than legitimate. Some employees are more apt to accept change when managers rely on a consultative strategy and are more likely to resist change when managers use a legitimating tactic.

· “Glad handing” is not a good long-term strategy. Ingratiation improved short-term sales goal achievement but reduced it in the long term in a study of salespeople. Glad handing may help today’s sales but not tomorrow’s.

· Be subtle. Subtle flattery and agreement with the other person’s opinion (both forms of ingratiation) were shown to increase the likelihood that executives would win recommendation to sit on boards of directors.

· Learn to influence. Research with corporate managers of a supermarket chain showed that influence tactics can be taught and learned. Managers who received 360-degree feedback on two occasions regarding their influence tactics showed an increased use of core influence tactics.

You’ll need to understand and effectively apply a range of influence tactics to be effective. But you can learn and improve influence tactics to move resisters to compliance and move those who are compliant to commitment. 

What Is the Difference between Leading and Managing? 

Bernard Bass, a leadership expert, concluded that “leaders manage and managers lead, but the two activities are not synonymous.” 19  Broadly speaking, managers typically perform functions associated with planning, investigating, organizing, and control, and leaders focus on influencing others. Leaders inspire others, provide emotional support, and try to get employees to rally around a common goal. Leaders also play a key role in creating a vision and strategic plan for an organization. Managers, in turn, are charged with implementing the vision and plan. We can draw several conclusions from this division of labor.

First, good leaders are not necessarily good managers, and good managers are not necessarily good leaders. Second, effective leadership requires effective managerial skills at some level. For example, United’s former CEO, Jeff Smisek, resigned due to managerial deficiencies that produced labor problems, poor customer service, and poor financial results. 20  In contrast, both Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, and Mary Dillon,Page 471 CEO of Ulta Beauty, are recognized for their use of good managerial skills when implementing corporate strategies. 21

Do you want to lead others or understand what makes a leader tick? Then take the following self-assessment. It provides feedback on your readiness to assume a leadership role and can help you consider how to prepare for a formal leadership position.

SELF-ASSESSMENT 14.3  

Assessing Your Readiness to Assume the Leadership Role

The following survey was designed to assess your readiness to assume the leadership role. Please be prepared to answer these questions if your instructor has assigned  Self-Assessment 14.3  in Connect.

1. What is your level of readiness? Are you surprised by the results?

2. Looking at the three highest- and lowest-rated items in the survey, what can you do to increase your readiness to lead? Think of specific actions you take right now.

3. Do you think your readiness to lead will change over time? Explain your rationale.

An Integrated Model of Leadership

Figure 14.1  provides an overview of what you will learn in this chapter. It presents an integrated model of leadership. Starting at the far right of the model, you see that leadership effectiveness is the outcome we want to explain. The center of the model shows this outcome is influenced by four types of leadership behavior: task-oriented, relationship-oriented, passive, and transformational. In turn, our ability to effectively engage in these leader behaviors is affected by traits, gender, and leadership skills (the left side of the model). 

FIGURE 14.1  An integrated model of leadership

Moreover,  Figure 14.1  shows that the relationship between leader behavior and leadership effectiveness is affected by two other considerations: power and influence and situational factors. For example, people with more power and strong influence skills are better suited to execute the four types of leader behavior in a more effective manner. Similarly, you will be more effective if you exhibit the four leader behaviors at the right time. Different situations call for different leader behaviors. This chapter helps you understand when to change your leadership style and behavior.

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14.2

Trait Approaches: Do Leaders Have Distinctive Traits and Personal Characteristics?

MAJOR QUESTION What does it take to be a successful leader?

THE BIG PICTURE

Trait approaches attempt to identify distinctive characteristics that account for the effectiveness of leaders. We describe (1) positive task-oriented traits and positive/negative interpersonal attributes (narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy) and (2) some results of gender studies.

Consider a leader dubbed “CEO of the Decade” in 2009 by Fortune magazine for 10 years of achievements in the fields of music, movies, and mobile phones, not to mention computing. “Remaking any one business is a career-defining achievement,” wrote Fortune editor Adam Lashinsky; “four is unheard of.” 22

That leader was, of course, the late Steve Jobs of Apple. Did he have distinctive personality traits that might teach us something about leadership? Perhaps he did. He seemed to embody the traits of (1) dominance, (2) intelligence, (3) self-confidence, (4) high energy, and (5) task-relevant knowledge.

These are the five traits that researcher Ralph Stogdill in 1948 concluded were typical of successful leaders. 23  Stogdill is one of many contributors to  trait approaches to leadership, which attempt to identify distinctive characteristics that account for the effectiveness of leaders. 24

Positive Task-Oriented Traits and Positive/Negative Interpersonal Attributes

Traits play a central role in how we perceive leaders, and they ultimately affect leadership effectiveness. 25  This is why researchers have attempted to identify a more complete list of traits that differentiate leaders from followers.  Table 14.2  shows an expanded list of both positive and negative interpersonal attributes often found in leaders.26

Leadership at TOMS. Texas native Blake Mycoskie is the founder of TOMS shoes and several other global businesses based on his “One for one”® premise: that every purchase, whether of shoes, eye wear, coffee, or a handbag, should help someone in need. Among other achievements, his companies have donated 60 million pairs of shoes, restored eyesight to almost half a million people, and provided safe water and childbirth services to thousands.31 What positive leadership traits do you think Mycoskie possesses?© Zuma Press, Inc/Alamy.

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TABLE 14.2 KEY TASK-ORIENTED TRAITS AND INTERPERSONAL ATTRIBUTES

POSITIVE TASK-ORIENTED TRAITS	POSITIVE/NEGATIVE INTERPERSONAL ATTRIBUTES
· Intelligence	· Extraversion (+)
· Conscientiousness	· Agreeableness (+)
· Open to experience	· Emotional intelligence (+)
· Emotional stability	· Narcissism (−)
· Positive affect	· Machiavellianism (−)
	· Psychopathy (−)

We have discussed most positive interpersonal attributes elsewhere, but we need to describe the negative, or “dark side,” traits of some leaders: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.27

·   Narcissism is defined as having “a self-centered perspective, feelings of superiority, and a drive for personal power and glory.” 28  Narcissists have inflated views of themselves, seek to attract the admiration of others, and fantasize about being in control of everything. Although passionate and charismatic, narcissistic leaders may provoke counterproductive work behaviors in others, such as strong resentments and resistance. 29

· Machiavellianism. Inspired by the pessimistic beliefs of Niccolò Machiavelli, a philosopher and writer (The Prince) in the Italian Renaissance,  Machiavellianism (pronounced “mah-kyah-vel-yahn-izm”) displays a cynical view of human nature and condones opportunistic and unethical ways of manipulating people, putting results over principles. This view is manifested in such expressions as “All people lie to get what they want” and “You have to cheat to get ahead.” Like narcissism, Machiavellianism is also associated with counterproductive work behaviors, especially as people begin to understand that they are being coldly manipulated.

· Psychopathy.  Psychopathy (“sigh-kop-a-thee”) is characterized by lack of concern for others, impulsive behavior, and a dearth of remorse when the psychopath’s actions harm others. Not surprisingly, a person with a psychopathic personality can be a truly toxic influence in the workplace.

If you have a propensity for any of these, you need to know that the expression of “dark side” traits tends to result in career derailment—being demoted or fired.30

Leadership at Turing Pharmaceuticals. Martin Shkreli (seated, center), founder and former CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, tried to build a business strategy of purchasing the rights to inexpensive but life-saving prescription drugs and raising their prices to dizzying heights. Public response was swift and devastatingly negative; meanwhile, Shkreli has pleaded not guilty to fraud charges associated with other firms he managed.32 Do you think he possesses any dark-side traits?© Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Newscom

Do Women and Men Display Similar Leadership Traits?

The increase in the number of of women in the workforce has generated much interest in understanding the similarities and differences between female and male leaders. Research reveals the following four conclusions:

1. Men were observed to display more task leadership and women more relationship leadership. 33

2. Page 474

Women used a more democratic or participative style than men, and men used a more autocratic and directive style. 34

3. Female leadership was associated with more cohesion, cooperative learning, and participative communication among team members. 35

4. Peers, managers, direct reports, and judges/trained observers rated women executives as more effective than men. Men also rated themselves as more effective than women evaluated themselves.36

Sheryl Sandberg. Named in 2014 the ninth most powerful woman in the world by Forbes and the 10th most powerful woman in business by Fortune, Sandberg is the chief operating officer (COO) and business face of Facebook. She’s also a passionate advocate for women achieving more top corporate leadership jobs. As she told a Barnard College graduating class, “A world where men ran half our homes and women ran half our institutions would be just a much greater world.”© Bloomberg/Getty Images

EXAMPLE

Great Leaders Worldwide

Canada’s Justin Trudeau. Although he is the son of an earlier and long-time prime minister, Canada’s popular new leader Justin Trudeau came to politics by an unusual route. He has been a teacher, a bouncer, the leader of a nonprofit organization, and even an occasional actor. As prime minister he has won praise for championing the rights of women and Canada’s indigenous population (his cabinet is 50% women and includes an openly gay politician, a member who is blind, Sikhs, and Aboriginals), for highlighting his role as a husband and father, and for leading the country with grace and skill. His humility, optimism, and willingness to admit mistakes and open dialogues with those who disagree with him reflect a high degree of emotional intelligence. As one Canadian observer says of Trudeau, “The very skills the prime minister honed as a teacher and third-sector leader are key to his ability to motivate and react with agility—not just his caucus but Canadians and other global leaders. The successful teacher and senior leader has an ability to parse diverse threads, read situations, motivations, and personalities, and respond in real time. An increasingly in-demand skill amidst huge change.”37

Justin Trudeau. Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau (in green) participates in a Pride Parade in Vancouver, Canada.© Sergei Bachlakov/Shutterstock RF Angela Merkel. Federal Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel.© Thomas Frey/imageBROKER/Alamy

Germany’s Angela Merkel. Angela Merkel, long-time chancellor of Germany, grew up in the Communist-controlled sector of a divided country struggling to overcome the horrors of World War II and its disastrous defeat. A chemist by training who also served as environmental minister, she is now the longest-term leader in Europe and one of the most powerful women on the planet. Her generally cautious and low-key approach has helped her lead her re-unified country through globalization, enormous economic and technological change, and a worldwide financial crisis. More recently this disciplined realist has also taken the lead in offering shelter to more than 1 million Muslim and other refugees who have crossed Germany’s border.

Though some are critical of her humane and generous stance and even suggest it could lead to her political downfall, Merkel herself says, “In many regions war and terror prevail.Page 475 States disintegrate. For many years we have read about this. We have heard about it. We have seen it on TV. But we had not yet sufficiently understood that what happens in Aleppo and Mosul can affect Essen or Stuttgart. We have to face that now.”38 

YOUR CALL

What leadership traits do you think Justin Trudeau exhibits? What leadership traits does Angela Merkel seem to have? Which do they share, and how do they differ? What might account for any differences?

Are Knowledge and Skills Important? 

Knowledge and skills are extremely important! A team of researchers identified four basic skills leaders need. (See  Table 14.3 .)

TABLE  14.3  FOUR BASIC SKILLS FOR LEADERS

WHAT LEADERS NEED	AND WHY
Cognitive abilities  to identify problems and their causes in rapidly changing situations	Leaders must sometimes devise effective solutions in short time spans with limited information. One situation requiring quick action that many managers will likely face is a data breach. Says Ralph de la Vega, president & CEO, AT&T Mobile & Business Solutions, “There are only two kinds of companies today … those that have experienced a data breach and those that will be breached.”39
Interpersonal skills  to influence and persuade others	Leaders need to work well with diverse people. Alan Colberg, president and CEO of Assurant, says civility is one of a handful of key interpersonal skills in every career. The others he cites are the abilities to build relationships, conscientiousness, and integrity.40
Business skills  to maximize the use of organizational assets	Leaders increasingly need business skills as they advance up through an organization. Three valuable but often-overlooked skills that most people can develop with a little effort are mindfulness, curiosity, and optimism.41
Strategic skills  to draft an organization’s mission, vision, strategies, and implementation plans	Strategic skills matter most for individuals in the top ranks in an organization. Entrepreneurs may have their strategic skills tested on a regular basis. Sara Blakely’s father regularly asked her, “What have you failed at this week?” After repeated setbacks, she eventually came up with the line of slimming intimate wear she called Spanx.42

SOURCE: Adapted from T. V. Mumford, M. A. Campion, and F. P. Morgeson, “Leadership Skills Strataplex: Leadership Skill Requirements across Organizational Levels,” Leadership Quarterly, 2007, 154–166.

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So What Do We Know about Leadership Traits?

Trait theory offers us four conclusions.

1. We cannot ignore the implications of leadership traits. Traits play a central role in the way we perceive leaders, and they do ultimately affect leadership effectiveness. For instance, focus, confidence, transparency, and integrity were among the top traits listed in a survey of current business leaders, along with patience, openness, and generosity.43 

More specifically, many companies attempt to define leadership traits important for their context. The Cardiac Rhythm Disease Management Group within Medtronic Inc., for example, identified nine types of traits and skills necessary for leaders (such as giving clear performance feedback and being courageous). The company then designed a leadership development program to help its employees learn and apply these traits.44

2. The positive and “dark triad” traits suggest the qualities you should cultivate and avoid if you want to assume a leadership role in the future. Elon Musk, founder of electric car manufacturer Tesla, is widely admired for his vision and daring but admits to being a micro manager to an extreme degree. Limiting employees’ freedom in this way is generally viewed as a negative quality in a leader.45 Personality tests and other trait assessments can help evaluate your strengths and weaknesses on these traits. The website for this book contains a host of tests you can take for this purpose. 

3. Organizations may want to include personality and trait assessments in their selection and evaluation processes. For example, Cisco’s UK leader, Vice President Eleanor Cavanagh-Lomas, uses “data analytics,” an algorithm designed to assess her management team’s individual strengths based on a brief multiple-choice self-assessment test. The app suggests how each person works best and how to motivate him or her.46

4. A global mind-set is an increasingly valued task-oriented trait. As more companies expand their international operations and hire more culturally diverse people for domestic operations in the United States, they want to enhance employees’ global mind-set.47 A  global mind-set  is your belief in your ability to influence dissimilar others in a global context. For an illustration, see the Example box.

EXAMPLE

Multicultural Leadership

When she was in her early 20s, Ava Brown struggled to start a teaching career in the UK and soon returned to her native Jamaica, where she continued working while enrolled in a distance-learning MBA program. Now in her 30s, she is back in the UK, as a global business development manager for IHS Global in London. Of the differences between leadership styles in Jamaica and the UK, Brown says, “The thing about England is that it’s very multicultural. You’re dealing with people from different cultures and you’ve got to think about a lot of other factors when you’re managing them. I find the management style here in the UK is a bit more consultative. There’s more staff involvement. It’s certainly very different from when I was managing people in Jamaica. … My advice on leadership is deal with people from different cultures as individuals. Respect people and also understand that at the end of the day we’re humans first. I think that’s what counts. If you can do that then that takes care of it all.”48 

Experts agree with Brown that respect for individuals truly matters in developing a global mind-set. Building trust, empathizing, and fostering openness and team identity by making time for regular face-to-face communication all pave the way for cross-cultural understanding.49

YOUR CALL

What positive leadership traits and attributes do you think Ava Brown possesses? How do you think they contribute to her ability to manage people in cultures as different as Jamaica’s and the United Kingdom’s? 

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14.3

Behavioral Approaches: Do Leaders Show Distinctive Patterns of Behavior?

MAJOR QUESTION Do effective leaders behave in similar ways?

THE BIG PICTURE

Behavioral leadership approaches try to determine unique behaviors displayed by effective leaders. These approaches can be divided into four categories, the first three of which are discussed in this section: (1) task-oriented behavior, (2) relationship-oriented behavior, (3) passive behavior, and (4) transformational behavior (discussed in  Section 14.5 ).

Maybe what’s important to know about leaders is not their personality traits but rather their patterns of behavior. This is the line of thought pursued by those interested in  behavioral leadership approaches, which attempt to determine the unique behaviors displayed by effective leaders. These approaches can be divided into four categories:

· Task-oriented behavior.

· Relationship-oriented behavior.

· Passive behavior.

· Transformational behavior (discussed in  Section 14.5 ).

Task-Oriented Leader Behaviors: Initiating-Structure Leadership and Transactional Leadership

The primary purpose of  task-oriented leadership behaviors is to ensure that people, equipment, and other resources are used in an efficient way to accomplish the mission of a group or organization. 50  Examples of task-oriented behaviors are planning, clarifying, monitoring, and problem solving. However, two kinds are particularly important: (1) initiating-structure leadership and (2) transactional leadership. 51

Men of steel. What kind of leadership behavior is appropriate for directing these kinds of workers—the kind that directs them how to complete the task or the kind that develops good worker–boss relationships?© Steve Dunwell/Getty ImagesPage 478

Initiating-Structure Leadership: “Here’s What We Do to Get the Job Done”

Initiating-structure leadership is leader behavior that organizes and defines—that is, “initiates the structure for”—what employees should be doing to maximize output. Clearly, this is a very task-oriented approach.

Example: The Seattle-based Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the largest philanthropic foundation in the world, dedicated to relieving poverty and enhancing health care and educational opportunities with an annual endowment of nearly $40 billion. The organization holds regular “failure fests,” at which employees, relieved of the fear of failure, are free to discuss missteps and uncover ways to learn from them. Each future initiative can then benefit from lessons learned on what to do and what not to do.52

Transactional Leadership: “Here’s What We Do to Get the Job Done, and Here Are the Rewards”

As a manager, your power stems from your ability to provide rewards (and threaten reprimands) in exchange for your subordinates’ doing the work. When you do this, you are performing  transactional leadership, focusing on clarifying employees’ roles and task requirements and providing rewards and punishments contingent on performance. As with initiating-structure leadership, transactional leadership also encompasses setting goals and monitoring progress. 53

Example: Chicago-based ThoughtWorks, a software developer, employs 40 sales representatives. When the company was founded in 1993, CEO Craig Gorsline determined that the sales reps’ roles and task requirements were to explain software pricing and policies, as well as close sales and do customer hand holding. The rewards paid to reps consisted of commissions on the revenue they generated, a common method of compensation in sales.

Recently, ThoughtWorks executives decided this transactional model had to be changed. Customers now use the Internet to compare pricing and policies. Moreover, paying sales commissions ran the risk of such negative behaviors as, according to The New York Times, “focusing on an individual’s profit over the company’s, emphasizing short-term outcomes, and encouraging competition among sales representatives.” 54  The new world demanded reps who could do what was right for the customer rather than themselves. Accordingly, ThoughtWorks abolished commissions in favor of paying reps a straight salary—a move many favored because it guaranteed them a steady paycheck.

Initiating-structure leadership has a moderately strong positive relationship with leadership effectiveness, according to research. 55  Transaction leadership also has a positive association with leader effectiveness and group performance. 56

Relationship-Oriented Leader Behavior: Consideration, Empowerment, Ethical Leadership, and Servant Leadership

Relationship-oriented leadership is primarily concerned with the leader’s interactions with his or her people. The emphasis is on enhancing employees’ skills and creating positive work relationships among coworkers and between the leader and the led. Such leaders often act as mentors, providing career advice, giving employees assignments that will broaden their skills, and empowering them to make their own decisions. 57

There are four kinds of relationship-oriented behaviors:

· Consideration

· Empowering leadership

· Ethical leadership

· Servant leadership

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Consideration: “The Concerns and Needs of My Employees Are Highly Important”

Consideration is leader behavior that is concerned with group members’ needs and desires and that is directed at creating mutual respect or trust. This is an important type of behavior to use in addition to task leadership because it promotes social interactions and identification with the team and leader. Considerate leader behavior has a moderately strong positive relationship with measures of leadership effectiveness. 58

The most effective leaders use different blends of task behavior and consideration when interacting with others. To what extent do you think you do this when interacting with school or work colleagues? You can answer this question by taking  Self-Assessment 14.4 .

SELF-ASSESSMENT 14.4  

Assessing Your Task- and Relationship-Oriented Leader Behavior 

The following survey was designed to evaluate your own leader behavior. Please be prepared to answer these questions if your instructor has assigned  Self-Assessment 14.4  in Connect.

1. Do you prefer to use task or relationship leadership? Why do you think this is the case?

2. Look at the items for the two lowest scored items for initiating structure and consideration and then identify how you can increase the extent to which you display both types of leadership.

3. When would it be most important to display initiating structure and consideration? Explain your rationale.

Empowering Leadership: “I Want My Employees to Feel They Have Control over Their Work”

Empowering leadership represents the extent to which a leader creates perceptions of psychological empowerment in others.  Psychological empowerment is employees’ belief that they have control over their work. Such psychological empowerment is expected to drive intrinsic motivation, creativity, and performance. 59  Let’s see how this process works.

Increasing employee psychological empowerment requires four kinds of behaviors—leading for (1) meaningfulness, (2) self-determination, (3) competence, and (4) progress.

· Leading for meaningfulness: inspiring and modeling desirable behaviors. Managers lead for meaningfulness by inspiring their employees and modeling desired behaviors. Example: Employees may be helped to identify their passions at work by the leader’s creating an exciting organizational vision that employees can connect with emotionally. Employees at drug maker Millennium, for example, are inspired by the company’s vision to cure cancer. 60

· Leading for self-determination: delegating meaningful tasks. Managers can lead for employee self-determination by delegating meaningful tasks to them. “Delegating is essential,” says Gail Evans, an executive vice president at Atlanta-based CNN. “If you refuse to let your staff handle their own projects, you’re jeopardizing their advancement—because they aren’t learning new skills and adding successes to their resume.” 61

· Leading for competence: supporting and coaching employees. It goes without saying that employees need to have the necessary knowledge to perform their jobs. Accomplishing this goal involves managers’ supporting and coaching their employees. Assigning a challenging task will help to fuel workers’ intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy.62

· Leading for progress: monitoring and rewarding employees. Managers lead for progress by monitoring and rewarding others. We discussed how to do this in  Chapter 12 .

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Ethical Leadership: “I Am Ready to Do the Right Thing”

  Ethical leadership  represents normatively appropriate behavior that focuses on being a moral role model. This includes communicating ethical values to others, rewarding ethical behavior, and treating followers with care and concern.63

Ethical leadership is clearly driven by personal factors related to our beliefs and values. It also has a reciprocal relationship with an organization’s culture and climate. In other words, an ethical culture and climate promote ethical leadership, and ethical leadership in turn promotes an ethical culture and climate. Such leadership is positively related to employee job satisfaction, organizational commitment, organizational citizenship behavior, motivation, and task performance.64 It also is negatively associated with job stress, counterproductive work behavior, and intentions to quit.65 It appears that ethical leadership has many positive benefits.

EXAMPLE

An Empowering and Ethical Leader

Jeff Booth is the co-founder of a Canadian company that helps customers buy home-improvement products online. BuildDirect currently has 315 employees and over $150 million in revenue; both figures have been growing fast. The company has twice won awards based on employee engagement, a quality Booth encourages with his explicit focus on empowering his teams. Employees lead and participate in regular “fireside chats,” social committees, charitable giving, and decisions about the company’s future.

Booth’s leadership advice is as follows:

1. Lead by example. “To be a successful leader,” he says, “I believe your actions must align with who you are. If you believe and trust in who you are, your employees will too. Then leading becomes easy. What’s more, you’ll attract the people that will comfortably follow your authentic example.”

2. Stick with your message. “Believe in your decisions, give people the time to adjust and process the change, and then help them find ways to adapt.”

3. Hear what people aren’t saying. “Active investigation” of what’s going on below the surface will allow leaders to uncover and resolve the real issues.

4. See things from employees’ perspectives. “A strong leader is empathetic. You must walk in another’s shoes to truly understand her perspective. Only then can you begin to address challenges and move towards helping that person grow and achieve great things.”

5. Prioritize the success of others. “A great leader works for his team. Empowering people means genuinely committing to their success, not your own.”66

YOUR CALL

How are Booth’s guidelines both ethical and empowering? Which of his leadership actions allow employees to feel they have control over their work, which demonstrate an ethical belief system, and how do they interconnect to make his company successful?

Servant-Leadership: “I Want to Serve My Subordinates and the Organization, Not Myself”

The term servant-leadership, coined by Robert Greenleaf in 1970, reflects not only his onetime background as a management researcher for AT&T but also his views as a lifelong philosopher and devout Quaker. 67   Servant-leadership focuses on providing increased service to others—meeting the goals of both followers and the organization—rather than to oneself.

Servant-leadership is not a quick-fix approach to leadership. Rather, it is a long-term approach to life and work. Ten characteristics of the servant leader are shown opposite. (See  Table 14.4 .) One can hardly go wrong by trying to adopt these characteristics.

TABLE 14.4 Ten Characteristics of the Servant Leader

1. Focus on listening

2. Ability to empathize with others’ feelings

3. Focus on healing suffering

4. Self-awareness of strengths and weaknesses

5. Use of persuasion rather than positional authority to influence others

6. Broad-based conceptual thinking

7. Ability to foresee future outcomes

8. Believe they are stewards of their employees and resources

9. Commitment to the growth of people

10. Drive to build community within and outside the organization

Source: From L. C. Spears, “Introduction: Servant-Leadership and the Greenleaf Legacy,” in L. C. Spears, ed., Reflections on Leadership: How Robert K. Greenleaf’s Theory of Servant-Leadership Influenced Today’s Top Management (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1995), pp. 1–14.

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EXAMPLE

Servant-Leadership: Leaders Who Work for the Led

Who are some successful servant leaders?

A Listener First. Mike DeFrino defines servant-leadership as “the ability to both serve and lead and to do so without expecting anything back.” DeFrino is the CEO of Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants, and because he believes that “most of the intelligence in the organization is much closer to the ground than the corner office,” around his employees he is a dedicated listener rather than a talker.68

An Advocate for the Public Good. Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz is not running for president, but he is not afraid to say the United States deserves a servant leader and that publicly owned companies, too, should “use our scale for good.”69 Part of his effort to promote that “good” is to provide generous employee benefits, even for part-timers, including full health care coverage, stock options, and fully paid community college degrees for all. Schultz has also promised to provide 100,000 jobs and internships for young people and to hire 10,000 military veterans.70

YOUR CALL

Understandably, servant-leadership is popular with employees. Can you think of situations in which this kind of leadership role would not be appropriate?

Employees whose manager displays the characteristics shown in  Table 14.4  are likely to be happier, more productive, more creative, and more willing to go above and beyond their customary duties. 71  The following self-assessment measures the extent to which you possess a serving orientation. Results from the assessment will enhance your understanding of what it takes to really be a servant leader. 

SELF-ASSESSMENT 14.5  

Assessing Your Servant Orientation 

The following survey is designed to assess the extent to which you possess a servant orientation. Please be prepared to answer these questions if your instructor has assigned  Self-Assessment 14.5  in Connect.

1. To what extent do you possess a servant orientation? Are you surprised by the results?

2. How might you demonstrate more servant-leadership in your teams at work or school? Be specific.

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Passive Leadership: The Lack of Leadership Skills

Passive leadership is a form of leadership behavior characterized by a lack of leadership skills. For example, in the type of passive leadership called the management-by-exception style, managers do not intervene until problems are brought to their attention or until the problems become serious enough to demand action. 72

Another passive type is l aissez-faire leadership, a form of “leadership” characterized by a general failure to take responsibility for leading. Not taking responsibility can hardly be considered leadership (although it often seems to be manifested by CEOs whose companies get in trouble, as when they say, “I had no idea about the criminal behavior of my subordinates”). Interestingly, laissez-faire (“lay-zay fair”) leadership is seen more in men than women. 73

Examples of laissez-faire leadership are seen in various kinds of failure—failing to deal with conflict, to coach employees on difficult assignments, to help set performance goals, to give performance feedback, to deal with bullying, and so on. This passive leadership has a huge negative impact on employee perceptions of leaders—outweighing their positive perceptions of contributions by initiating structure, transactional, and consideration forms of leadership. 74

Passive leadership. Do you really hate to get involved in conflict, like the man looking out the window? Passive leadership like this does not lead to positive outcomes. Have you ever been managed by a passive leader? Where you happy in this situation?© Digital Vision RF

Some Practical Implications of the Behavioral Approaches

Two key conclusions we may take away from the behavioral approaches are the following:

1. A leader’s behavior is more important than his or her traits. It is important to train managers on the various forms of task and relationship leadership.

2. There is no one best style of leadership. How effective a particular leadership behavior is depends on the situation at hand. ●

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14.4

Situational Approaches: Does Leadership Vary with the Situation?

MAJOR QUESTION How might effective leadership vary according to the situation at hand?

THE BIG PICTURE

Effective leadership behavior depends on the situation at hand, say believers in two contingency approaches: Fiedler’s contingency leadership model and House’s path–goal leadership model.

Perhaps leadership is not characterized by universally important traits or behaviors. There is no one best style that will work in all situations. This is the point of view of proponents of the  situational approach (or  contingency approach) to leadership, who believe that effective leadership behavior depends on the situation at hand. That is, as situations change, different styles become appropriate.

Let’s consider two situational approaches: (1) the contingency leadership model by Fiedler and (2) the path–goal leadership model by House.

1. The Contingency Leadership Model: Fiedler’s Approach

The oldest model of the contingency approach to leadership was developed by Fred Fiedler and his associates in 1951. 75  The  contingency leadership model determines if a leader’s style is (1) task-oriented or (2) relationship-oriented and if that style is effective for the situation at hand. Fiedler’s work was based on 80 studies conducted over 30 years.

Two Leadership Orientations: Tasks versus Relationships

Are you task-oriented or relationship-oriented? That is, are you more concerned with task accomplishment or with people?

Contingency leadership. What type of leadership would be most effective for this employee working at a small, owner-operated grocery store? Do you think she needs more or less task leadership? Why?© Henglein and Steets/Getty Images

To find out, you or your employees would fill out a questionnaire (known as the least preferred coworker, or LPC, scale), in which you think of the coworker you least enjoyed working with and rate him or her according to an eight-point scale of 16 pairs of opposite characteristics (such as friendly/unfriendly, tense/relaxed, efficient/inefficient). The higher the score, the more the relationship-oriented the respondent; the lower the score, the more task-oriented.

The Three Dimensions of Situational Control

Once the leadership orientation is known, then you determine situational control—how much control and influence a leader has in the immediate work environment.

There are three dimensions of situational control: leader-member relations, task structure, and position power.

· Leader-member relations—“Do my subordinates accept me as a leader?” This dimension, the most important component of situational control, reflects the extent to which a leader has or doesn’t have the support, loyalty, and trust of the work group.

· Page 484

Task structure—“Do my subordinates perform unambiguous, easily understood tasks?” This dimension refers to the extent to which tasks are routine, unambiguous, and easily understood. The more structured the jobs, the more influence a leader has.

· Position power—“Do I have power to reward and punish?” This dimension refers to how much power a leader has to make work assignments and reward and punish. More power equals more control and influence.

For each dimension, the amount of control can be high—the leader’s decisions will produce predictable results because he or she has the ability to influence work outcomes. Or it can be low—he or she doesn’t have that kind of predictability or influence. By combining the three different dimensions with different high/low ratings, we have eight different leadership situations. These are represented in the diagram below. (See  Figure 14.2 .)

FIGURE 14.2  Representation of Fiedler’s contingency model

Source: Adapted from F. E. Fiedler, “Situational Control and a Dynamic Theory of Leadership,” in Managerial Control and Organizational Democracy, ed. B. King, S. Streufert, and F. E. Fiedler (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1978), p. 114.

Which Style Is Most Effective?

Neither leadership style is effective all the time, Fiedler’s research concludes, although each is right in certain situations.

· When task-oriented style is best. The task-oriented style works best in either high-control or low-control situations.

Example of a high-control situation (leader decisions produce predictable results because he or she can influence work outcomes): Suppose you were supervising parking-control officers ticketing cars parked illegally in expired meter zones, bus zones, and the like. You have (1) high leader-member relations because your subordinates are highly supportive of you and (2) high task structure because their jobs are clearly defined. (3) You have high position control because you have complete authority to evaluate their performance and dole out punishment and rewards. Thus, a task-oriented style would be best.

Example of a low-control situation (leader decisions can’t produce predictable results because he or she can’t really influence outcomes): Suppose you were a high school principal trying to clean up graffiti on your private-school campus, helped only by students you can find after school. You might havePage 485 (1) low leader-member relations because many people might not see the need for the goal. (2) The task structure might also be low because people might see many different ways to achieve the goal. And (3) your position power would be low because the committee is voluntary and people are free to leave. In this low-control situation, a task-oriented style would also be best.

· When relationship-oriented style is best. The relationship-oriented style works best in situations of moderate control.

Example: Suppose you were working in a government job supervising a group of firefighters fighting wildfires. You might have (1) low leader-member relations if you are promoted over others in the group but (2) high task structure, because the job is fairly well defined. (3) You might have low position power, because the rigidity of the civil-service job prohibits you from doing much in the way of rewarding and punishing. Thus, in this moderate-control situation, relationship-oriented leadership would be most effective.

What do you do if your leadership orientation does not match the situation? Then, says Fiedler, it’s better to try to move leaders into suitable situations rather than try to alter their personalities to fit the situations. 76

2. The Path–Goal Leadership Model: House’s Approach

A second situational approach, advanced by Robert House in the 1970s and revised by him in 1996, is the  path–goal leadership model, which holds that the effective leader makes available to followers desirable rewards in the workplace and increases their motivation by clarifying the  paths, or behavior, that will help them achieve those  goals and providing them with support. A successful leader thus helps followers by tying meaningful rewards to goal accomplishment, reducing barriers, and providing support, so as to increase “the number and kinds of personal payoffs to subordinates for work-goal attainment.” 77

Numerous studies testing various predictions from House’s original path–goal theory provided mixed results. 78  As a consequence, he proposed a new model, a graphical version of which is shown below. (See  Figure 14.3 .)

FIGURE 14.3  General representation of House’s revised path–goal theory Page 486

What Determines Leadership Effectiveness: Employee Characteristics and Environmental Factors Affect Leader Behavior

Two contingency factors, or variables—employee characteristics and environmental factors—cause some leadership behaviors to be more effective than others.

· Employee characteristics. Five employee characteristics are locus of control (described in  Chapter 11 ), task ability, need for achievement, experience, and need for path–goal clarity.

· Environmental factors. Two environmental factors are task structure (independent versus interdependent tasks) and work group dynamics.

· Leader behaviors. Originally, House proposed that there were four leader behaviors, or leadership styles—directive (“Here’s what’s expected of you and here’s how to do it”), supportive (“I want things to be pleasant, since everyone’s about equal here”), participative (“I want your suggestions in order to help me make decisions”), and achievement-oriented (“I’m confident you can accomplish the following great things”). The revised theory expands the number of leader behaviors from four to eight. (See  Table 14.5 , below.)

TABLE 14.5 Eight Leadership Styles of the Revised Path–Goal Theory

STYLE OF LEADER BEHAVIORS	DESCRIPTION OF BEHAVIOR TOWARD EMPLOYEES
1. Path–goal clarifying (“Here’s what’s expected of you and here’s how to do it.”)	Clarify performance goals. Provide guidance on how employees can complete tasks. Clarify performance standards and expectations. Use positive and negative rewards contingent on performance.
2. Achievement-oriented (“I’m confident you can accomplish the following great things.”)	Set challenging goals. Emphasize excellence. Demonstrate confidence in employee abilities.
3. Work facilitation (“Here’s the goal, and here’s what I can do to help you achieve it.”)	Plan, schedule, organize, and coordinate work. Provide mentoring, coaching, counseling, and feedback to assist employees in developing their skills. Eliminate roadblocks. Provide resources. Empower employees to take actions and make decisions.
4. Supportive (“I want things to be pleasant, since everyone’s about equal here.”)	Treat as equals. Show concern for well-being and needs. Be friendly and approachable.
5. Interaction facilitation (“Let’s see how we can all work together to accomplish our goals.”)	Emphasize collaboration and teamwork. Encourage close employee relationships and sharing of minority opinions. Facilitate communication; resolve disputes.
6. Group-oriented decision making (“I want your suggestions in order to help me make decisions.”)	Pose problems rather than solutions to work group. Encourage members to participate in decision making. Provide necessary information to the group for analysis. Involve knowledgeable employees in decision making.
7. Representation and networking (“I’ve got a great bunch of people working for me, whom you’ll probably want to meet.”)	Present work group in positive light to others. Maintain positive relationships with influential others. Participate in organization-wide social functions and ceremonies. Do unconditional favors for others.
8. Value-based (“We’re destined to accomplish great things.”)	Establish a vision, display passion for it, and support its accomplishment. Communicate high performance expectations and confidence in others’ abilities to meet their goals. Give frequent positive feedback. Demonstrate self-confidence.

Source: Adapted from R. J. House, “Path–Goal Theory of Leadership: Lessons, Legacy, and a Reformulated Theory,” Leadership Quarterly, Autumn 1996, pp. 323–352.

Page 487 Co-leaders. David Byttow (left) and Chrys Bader are co-founders of San Francisco–based Secret, an app that allows people to share messages anonymously with their friends. Which of the eight path-goal leadership styles would you expect to find dominating this organization?© David Paul Morris/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Thus, for example, employees with an internal locus of control are more likely to prefer achievement-oriented leadership or group-oriented decision making (formerly participative) leadership because they believe they have control over the work environment. The same is true for employees with high task ability and experience.

Employees with an external locus of control, however, tend to view the environment as uncontrollable, so they prefer the structure provided by supportive or path–goal clarifying (formerly directive) leadership. The same is probably true of inexperienced employees.

Besides expanding the styles of leader behavior from four to eight, House’s revision of his theory also puts more emphasis on the need for leaders to foster intrinsic motivation through empowerment. Finally, his revised theory stresses the concept of shared leadership, the idea that employees do not have to be supervisors or managers to engage in leader behavior but rather may share leadership among all employees of the organization.

Does the Revised Path–Goal Theory Work?

There have not been enough direct tests of House’s revised path–goal theory using appropriate research methods and statistical procedures to draw overall conclusions. Research on transformational leadership, however, which is discussed in  Section 14.5 , is supportive of the revised model. 79

Although further research is needed on the new model, it offers three important implications for managers: 80

· Use more than one leadership style. Effective leaders possess and use more than one style of leadership. Thus, you are encouraged to study the eight styles offered in path–goal theory so that you can try new leader behaviors when a situation calls for them.

· Page 488

Help employees achieve their goals. Leaders should guide and coach employees in achieving their goals by clarifying the path and removing obstacles to accomplishing them.

· Modify leadership style to fit employee and task characteristics. A small set of employee characteristics (ability, experience, and need for independence) and environmental factors (task characteristics of autonomy, variety, and significance) are relevant contingency factors, and managers should modify their leadership style to fit them. ●

PRACTICAL ACTION

Applying Situational Theories

How can you make situational theories work for you? A team of researchers proposed a general strategy managers can use across a variety of situations. It has five steps. 81  We explain how to implement the steps by using the examples of a head coach of a sports team and sales manager.

· Step 1: Identify important outcomes. Managers must first identify the goals they want to achieve. For example, the head coach may have games to win or wish to avoid injury to key players, whereas a sales manager’s goal might be to increase sales by 10 percent or reduce customers’ complaints by half.

· Step 2: Identify relevant leadership behaviors. Next managers need to identify the specific types of behaviors that may be appropriate for the situation at hand. The list in  Table 14.5  is a good starting point. A head coach in a championship game, for instance, might focus on achievement-oriented and work-facilitation behaviors. In contrast, a sales manager might find path-goal–clarifying, work-facilitation, and supportive behaviors more relevant for the sales team. Don’t try to use all available leadership behaviors. Rather, select the one or two that appear most helpful.

· Step 3: Identify situational conditions. Fiedler and House both identify a set of potential contingency factors to consider, but there may be other practical considerations. For example, a star quarterback on a football team may be injured, which might require the team to adopt a different strategy for winning the game. Similarly, the need to manage a virtual sales team with members from around the world will affect the types of leadership most effective in this context.

· Step 4: Match leadership to the conditions at hand. There are too many possible situational conditions for us to provide specific advice. This means you should use your knowledge about organizational behavior to find the best match between your leadership styles and behaviors and the situation at hand. The coach whose star quarterback is injured might use supportive and values-based behaviors to instill confidence that the team can win with a different quarterback. Our sales manager also might find it useful to use the empowering leadership associated with work-facilitation behaviors and avoid directive leadership.

· Step 5: Decide how to make the match. Managers can use guidelines from either contingency theory or path-goal theory: change the person in the leadership role or change his or her behavior. It is not possible to change the head coach in a championship game. This means the head coach needs to change his or her style or behavior to meet the specific challenge. In contrast, the organization employing the sales manager might move him or her to another position because the individual is too directive and does not like to empower others. Or the sales manager could change his or her behavior, if possible.

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14.5

The Uses of Transformational Leadership

MAJOR QUESTION What does it take to truly inspire people to perform beyond their normal levels?

THE BIG PICTURE

Four key behaviors of transformational leaders in affecting employees are they inspire motivation, inspire trust, encourage excellence, and stimulate them intellectually.

We have considered the major traditional approaches to understanding leadership—the trait, behavioral, and situational approaches. But newer approaches seem to offer something more by trying to determine what factors inspire and motivate people to perform beyond their normal levels.

One recent approach proposed by Bernard Bass and Bruce Avolio, known as  full-range leadership, suggests that leadership behavior varies along a full range of leadership styles, from passive (laissez-faire) “leadership” at one extreme, through transactional leadership, to transformational leadership at the other extreme. 82  As we stated, passive leadership is not leadership, but transactional and transformational leadership behaviors are both positive aspects of being a good leader. 83  We considered transactional leadership in  Section 14.3 . Here let’s consider transformational leadership.

Transformational Leaders

Transformational leadership transforms employees to pursue organizational goals over self-interests. Transformational leaders, in one description, “engender trust, seek to develop leadership in others, exhibit self-sacrifice, and serve as moral agents, focusing themselves and followers on objectives that transcend the more immediate needs of the work group.” 84  Whereas transactional leaders try to get people to do ordinary things, transformational leaders encourage their people to do exceptional things—significantly higher levels of intrinsic motivation, trust, commitment, and loyalty—that can produce significant organizational change and results.

Transformational leaders are influenced by two factors:

· Individual characteristics. The personalities of such leaders tend to be more extroverted, agreeable, proactive, and open to change than nontransformational leaders. (Female leaders tend to use transformational leadership more than male leaders do.) 85

· Organizational culture. Adaptive, flexible organizational cultures are more likely than are rigid, bureaucratic cultures to foster transformational leadership.

The Best Leaders Are Both Transactional and Transformational

It’s important to note that transactional leadership is an essential prerequisite to effective leadership, and the best leaders learn to display both transactional and transformational styles of leadership to some degree. Indeed, research suggests that transformational leadership leads to superior performance when it “augments,” or adds to, transactional leadership. 86

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Four Key Behaviors of Transformational Leaders

Whereas transactional leaders are dispassionate, transformational leaders excite passion, inspiring and empowering people to look beyond their own interests to the interests of the organization. They appeal to their followers’ self-concepts—their values and personal identity—to create changes in their goals, values, needs, beliefs, and aspirations.

Transformational leaders have four key kinds of behavior that affect followers. 87

1. Inspirational Motivation: “Let Me Share a Vision That Transcends Us All”

Transformational leaders have  charisma (“kar-riz-muh”), a form of interpersonal attraction that inspires acceptance and support. At one time,  charismatic leadership—which was assumed to be an individual inspirational and motivational characteristic of particular leaders, much like other trait-theory characteristics—was viewed as a category of its own, but now it is considered part of transformational leadership. 88  Someone with charisma, then, is presumed to be more able to persuade and influence people than someone without charisma.

A transformational leader inspires motivation by offering an agenda, a grand design, an ultimate goal—in short, a vision, “a realistic, credible, attractive future” for the organization, as leadership expert Burt Nanus calls it.89 This form of transformational leadership is more effective when leaders communicate their visions in abstract, far-reaching, and timeless messages, and when they establish specific, challenging goals to accompany the vision.90

Examples: Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. had a vision—a “dream,” as he put it—of racial equality. Candy Lightner, founder of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, had a vision of getting rid of alcohol-related car crashes. Apple Computer’s Steve Jobs had a vision of developing an “insanely great” desktop computer. To recruit John Scully, who was CEO of Pepsi at the time, Jobs asked, “Do you want to sell sugared water the rest of your life, or do you want a chance to change the world?”91

Martin Luther King Jr. Civil rights leader Martin Luther King was an inspiration to millions of people. Here he is addressing people during the March on Washington at the Lincoln Memorial. This is where he gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Do you think charismatic business leaders like King are able to be more successful than more conventional and conservative managers?© Agence France Presse/Central Press/Getty Images

2. Idealized Influence: “We Are Here to Do the Right Thing”

Transformational leaders are able to inspire trust in their followers because they express their integrity by being consistent, single-minded, and persistent in pursuit of their goal. NotPage 491 only do they display high ethical standards and act as models of desirable values, but they are also able to make sacrifices for the good of the group.

Example: Pope Francis, current leader of the Roman Catholic Church, challenges believers of all faiths to question old assumptions and to open their minds and hearts to those who are different from them. His mission is clear, and he expresses it powerfully.92

3. Individualized Consideration: “You Have the Opportunity Here to Grow and Excel”

Transformational leaders don’t just express concern for subordinates’ well-being. They actively encourage them to grow and to excel by giving them challenging work, more responsibility, empowerment, and one-on-one mentoring.

Example: Google discovered that one of the most essential characteristics of good leaders is the ability to get out of their subordinates’ way. Simply by being consistent, even predictable, in their own behavior, such managers empower their people with enormous freedom to be creative and excel.93

4. Intellectual Stimulation: “Let Me Describe the Great Challenges We Can Conquer Together”

These leaders are gifted at communicating the organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats so that subordinates develop a new sense of purpose. Employees become less apt to view problems as insurmountable or “that’s not my department.” Instead they learn to view them as personal challenges that they are responsible for overcoming, to question the status quo, and to seek creative solutions.

Example: John Mackey, CEO and co-founder of Whole Foods, feels the organic food industry hasn’t gone far enough to address social issues like responsible use of water and energy and fair labor standards for migrant workers. So he instituted a rating system to measure such practices, believing Whole Foods should play a role in pointing out and correcting gaps. Organic farmers protested the new system, calling it expensive and burdensome, but Mackey made only a few changes to it. “I am absolutely a contrarian,” he said of his decision. “You need dissonance, and you need someone who is challenging things. Otherwise you get stuck.”94

EXAMPLE

The Superior Performance of Both a Transactional and Transformational Leader: PepsiCo’s CEO, Indra Nooyi

PepsiCo’s Indra Nooyi, the company’s first female CEO, ranks in the top 15 of Forbes’s list of the 100 most powerful women in the United States.95 

An Early Lesson in Task Performance. As a young girl growing up in India, Nooyi competed against her sister every day as their mother asked them each to imagine herself a different world leader, deliver a campaign speech, and then wait to see which had won her mother’s “vote.” This “incredibly formative experience” taught Nooyi that she could become anything she wanted to be.96 

Long Term: Healthier Food. Nooyi, says Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, which has a joint-venture partnership with PepsiCo, was “way ahead of her competitors in moving the company toward healthier products. She pushed for PepsiCo to buy Quaker Oats and Tropicana, and … PepsiCo removed trans fats from its products well before most other companies did.” 97

Short Term: Stay Profitable. However, in remaking PepsiCo over the long term so that it sells less fat and sugar, Nooyi has also run up against the other goal for a public company—short-term results, or “maximizing shareholder value.” Although profits are up overall, earnings in some of the company’s overseas markets are down because of continued economic instability, higher input costs, and inflation.98

YOUR CALL

Which of the four key transformational leader behaviors did Nooyi display? What other types of leader behavior are evident in this example?

Have you worked for a transformational leader? The following self-assessment measures the extent to which a current or former manager used transformational leadership. Taking the assessment provides a good idea about the specific behaviors you need to exhibit if you want to lead in a transformational manner.

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SELF-ASSESSMENT 14.6  

Assessing Your Boss’s Transformational Leadership

Please be prepared to answer these questions if your instructor has assigned  Self-Assessment 14.6  in Connect.

1. What could your manager have done to be more transformational?

2. What three behaviors can you exhibit to increase your application of transformational leadership?

Implications of Transformational Leadership for Managers

The research shows that transformational leadership yields many positive outcomes. For example, it is positively associated with (1) measures of organizational effectiveness; 99  (2) measures of leadership effectiveness and employee job satisfaction; 100  (3) more employee identification with their leaders and with their immediate work groups; 101  (4) commitment to organizational change; 102  and (5) higher levels of intrinsic motivation, group cohesion, work engagement, setting of goals consistent with those of the leader, and proactive behavior. 103  Emloyees also are less likely to quit when their manager displays transformational leadership.104

Besides the fact that, as we mentioned, the best leaders are both transactional and transformational, there are three important implications of transformational leadership for managers, as follows.

1. It Can Improve Results for Both Individuals and Groups

You can use the four types of transformational behavior just described to improve results for individuals—such as job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and performance. You can also use them to improve outcomes for groups—an important matter in today’s organization, where people tend not to work in isolation but in collaboration with others.

2. It Can Be Used to Train Employees at Any Level

Not just top managers but employees at any level can be trained to be more transactional and transformational. 105  This kind of leadership training among employees should be based on an overall corporate philosophy that constitutes the foundation of leadership development.

3. It Requires Ethical Leaders

While ethical transformational leaders enable employees to enhance their self-concepts, unethical ones select or produce obedient, dependent, and compliant followers.

To better ensure positive results from transformational leadership, top managers should follow the practices shown below. (See  Table 14.6 .) ●

TABLE 14.6 The Ethical Things Top Managers Should Do to Be Effective Transformational Leaders

· Employ a code of ethics. The company should create and enforce a clearly stated code of ethics.

· Choose the right people. Recruit, select, and promote people who display ethical behavior.

· Make performance expectations reflect employee treatment. Develop performance expectations around the treatment of employees; these expectations can be assessed in the performance-appraisal process.

· Emphasize value of diversity. Train employees to value diversity.

· Reward high moral conduct. Identify, reward, and publicly praise employees who exemplify high moral conduct.

Source: These recommendations were derived from J. M. Howell and B. J. Avolio, “The Ethics of Charismatic Leadership: Submission or Liberation?” The Executive, May 1992, pp. 43–54.

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14.6

Three Additional Perspectives

MAJOR QUESTION If there are many ways to be a leader, which one would describe me best?

THE BIG PICTURE

Two other kinds of leadership are the leader–member exchange model, which emphasizes that leaders have different sorts of relationships with different subordinates, and leading with humility, grounded in the belief that something exists that is greater than ourselves. A third perspective is the role of followers in the leadership process.

Two additional kinds of leadership deserve discussion: (1) the leader–member exchange (LMX) model of leadership and (2) leading with humility.

Leader–Member Exchange (LMX) Leadership: Having Different Relationships with Different Subordinates

Proposed by George Graen and Fred Dansereau, the  leader–member exchange (LMX) model of leadership emphasizes that leaders have different sorts of relationships with different subordinates. 106  Unlike other models we’ve described, which focus on the behaviors or traits of leaders or followers, the LMX model looks at the quality of relationships between managers and subordinates. Also, unlike other models, which presuppose stable relationships between leaders and followers, the LMX model assumes each manager–subordinate relationship is unique.

In-Group Exchange versus Out-Group Exchange

The unique relationship, which supposedly results from the leader’s attempt to delegate and assign work roles, can produce two types of leader–member exchange interactions. 107

· In-group exchange: trust and respect. In the in-group exchange, the relationship between leader and follower becomes a partnership characterized by mutual trust, respect and liking, and a sense of common fates. Subordinates may receive special assignments and special privileges.

· Out-group exchange: lack of trust and respect. In the out-group exchange, leaders are characterized as overseers who fail to create a sense of mutual trust, respect, or common fate. Subordinates receive less of the manager’s time and attention than those in in-group exchange relationships.

What type of exchange do you have with your manager? The quality of the relationship between you and your boss matters. Not only does it predict your job satisfaction and happiness, but it also is related to turnover. You can assess the quality of the relationship with a current or former boss by completing  Self-Assessment 14.7 .

SELF-ASSESSMENT 14.7  

Assessing Your Leader–Member Exchange

The following survey was designed to assess the quality of your leader–member exchange. Please be prepared to answer these questions if your instructor has assigned  Self-Assessment 14.7  in Connect.

1. Where do you stand on the different dimensions underlying leader–member exchange? Are you surprised by the results?

2. Do you think the quality of your leader–member exchange is impacting your job satisfaction or performance? Explain.

3. Based on your survey scores, how might you improve the quality of your relationship with your boss? Be specific.

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Is the LMX Model Useful?

Yes! Consider that a high LMX is associated with individual-level behavioral outcomes like task performance, turnover, organizational citizenship, counterproductive behavior, and attitudinal outcomes such as organizational commitment, job satisfaction, and justice. 108  Differential treatment of team members (due to LMXs of different quality) also leads to negative outcomes.109 For example, a team of researchers found that differential treatment among members of soccer, hockey, and basketball teams led to negative team atmospheres, which in turn promoted poor perceptions of team performance. 110

The Power of Humility 

Humility is a relatively stable trait grounded in the belief that “something greater than the self exists.” 111  Although some think it is a sign of weakness or low self-esteem, nothing could be further from the truth.

Lazlo Bock. Google’s former senior vice president of People Operations, Lazlo Bock, is a strong believer in the power of humility. He was instrumental in getting Google to consider humility as a trait to be assessed during the recruiting process.© ChrisGoodney/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Humble leaders tend to display five key qualities valued by employees: high self-awareness, openness to feedback, appreciation of others, low self-focus, and appreciation of the greater good.112 Lazlo Bock, Google’s former senior vice president of People Operations, said humility is one of the traits he’s looking for in new hires. He concluded that “it is not just humility in creating space for others to contribute, ‘it’s intellectual humility. Without humility, you are unable to learn.”113

Although the scientific study of humility is relatively new, it has shown proven benefits for this trait. A Catalyst study of 1,500 workers in Australia, China, Germany, India, Mexico, and the United States revealed that employees felt included in their work teams when the boss was humble. 114  Another study conducted in China demonstrated cascading positive effects of CEO humility across two organizational levels. CEO humility positively influenced employee engagement, commitment, and performance.115

What can we conclude about humility in the context of managing others? First, try to be more humble by changing the focus of your accomplishment from “me” to “we.” Share credit with others, but by all means be authentic. Don’t try to fake humility.116 Second, a humble style is better than an arrogant or complacent one. 117  Third, an organization’s culture can promote humility. Employee-owned construction company TDIndustries does so with its agreed-upon set of cultural norms: “No rank in the room, everyone participates—no one dominates, and listen as an ally.” Employees also strive to be on a first-name basis with everyone.118

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Followers: What Do They Want, How Can They Help?

Is the quality of leadership dependent on the qualities of the followers being led? So it seems. Leaders and followers need each other, and the quality of the relationship determines how we behave as followers. 119

What Do Followers Want in Their Leaders?

Research shows that followers seek and admire leaders who create feelings of 

· Significance. Such leaders make followers feel that what they do at work is important and meaningful.

· Community. These leaders create a sense of unity that encourages followers to treat others with respect and to work together in pursuit of organizational goals.

· Excitement. The leaders make people feel energetic and engaged at work. 120

What Do Leaders Want in Their Followers?

Followers vary, of course, in their level of compliance with a leader, with helpers (most compliant) showing deference to their leaders, independents (less compliant) distancing themselves, and rebels (least compliant) showing divergence. 121

Leaders clearly benefit from having helpers (and, to some extent, independents). They want followers who are productive, reliable, honest, cooperative, proactive, and flexible. They do not want followers who are reluctant to take the lead on projects, fail to generate ideas, are unwilling to collaborate, withhold information, provide inaccurate feedback, or hide the truth. 122

We give some suggestions on how to be a better follower—and enhance your own career prospects—in the Practical Action box below.

PRACTICAL ACTION

How to Be a Good Leader by Being a Good Follower

Changing business culture and the increasing power of technology have shifted the relationship between leaders and followers. Good followers today don’t simply follow. They are empowered to let leaders know when things are going in the wrong direction.

Here’s how you can become an intelligent follower. These same skills can make you a good leader, too.123

1. Understand what motivates people. Learn about what coworkers, customers, and bosses want, and what drives them to do their best work (or to prevent others from working well). It sounds obvious, but don’t overlook the value of asking your boss how you can best communicate with each other and how often.

2. Choose your battles. You can’t win at everything, but you can choose where to invest your time and energy. Learn how to get along with coworkers, subordinates, and bosses who are similar to you as well as with those who are different.

3. Be brave. Don’t be afraid to tell your boss—diplomatically—when you think he or she may be wrong, and to offer intelligent alternatives. Helpful feedback is always valuable, and remember to be supportive when things are going well.

4. Work collaboratively. Being a good team player, meeting your goals, and letting the team take credit when appropriate can go a long way toward bringing out the best in others, including your boss when you are in a follower role. Also keep your boss informed; no one likes being caught by surprise.

5. Think critically. Develop your ability to ask the right questions, raise intelligent challenges, and maintain your own competence and motivation.

YOUR CALL

Although it’s always in your and the leader’s best interest if you become a good follower, sometimes the two of you may differ so completely in habits, dislikes, and so on that you may simply have to look for opportunities outside your present work situation. Do you think you’ve been a good follower in past jobs?

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15.1

The Communication Process: What It Is, How It Works

MAJOR QUESTION What do I need to know about the communication process to be an effective communicator?

THE BIG PICTURE

Communication is the transfer of information and understanding from one person to another. The process involves sender, message, and receiver; encoding and decoding; the medium; feedback; and “noise,” or interference. Managers need to tailor their communication to the appropriate medium (rich or lean) for the appropriate situation.

How good a communicator do you think you are? A survey of 400 U.S. employers and 613 college students revealed that more than 80% of employers and 75% of students believe oral and written communication skills are important for workplace success. However, while more than 60% of students reported they were skilled in oral and written communication, only 27% of employers endorsed this conclusion. 2  

Communication Defined: The Transfer of Information and Understanding

Researchers have begun to examine communication as a form of social information processing, in which receivers interpret messages by cognitively processing them. This work has led to development of a perceptual model of communication that depicts it as a process in which receivers create meaning in their own minds. 3  

Communication—the transfer of information and understanding from one person to another—is an activity that you as a manager will have to do a lot of. The fact that managers do a lot of communicating doesn’t mean they’re necessarily good at it—that is, that they are efficient or effective. You are an efficient communicator when you can transmit your message accurately in the least time. You are an effective communicator when your intended message is accurately understood by the other person. Thus, you may well be efficient in sending a group of people a reprimand by e-mail. But it may not be effective if it makes them angry so that they can’t absorb its meaning.

Everything’s clicking. Today some people can work almost anywhere, even more so as laptops, tablets, and cell phones have become such versatile instruments, permitting Internet and e-mail access, text messaging, and access to huge databases. Do you think our ability to work outside traditional offices because of today’s technology will negatively affect the communication process and employee camaraderie?© Erik Isakson/Tetra Images/Alamy RF

How the Communication Process Works

Communication has been said to be a process consisting of “a sender transmitting a message through media to a receiver who responds.” 4  A diagram of this communication process is shown next page. (See  Figure 15.1 .) Let’s take a look at its different parts.

Page 505FIGURE 15.1  The communication process “Noise” is not just noise or loud background sounds but any disturbance that interferes with transmission—static, fadeout, distracting facial expressions, an uncomfortable meeting site, competing voices, and so on. (left): © Fuse/Getty Images RF; (right): © paffy/Shutterstock

Sender, Message, and Receiver

The  sender  is the person wanting to share information—called a  message—and the  receiver  is the person for whom the message is intended, as follows.

· Sender → Message → Receiver

Encoding and Decoding

Of course, the process isn’t as simple as just sender/message/receiver. If you were an old-fashioned telegraph operator using Morse code to send a message over a telegraph line, you would first have to encode the message, and the receiver would have to decode it. But the same is true when you are sending the message by voice to another person in the same room and have to decide what language to speak in and what terms to use, and when you are texting a friend and can choose your words, your abbreviations and even an emoji or two.

Encoding  is translating a message into understandable symbols or language.  Decoding  is interpreting and trying to make sense of the message. Thus, the communication process is now

· Sender [Encoding] → Message → [Decoding] Receiver

The Medium

The means by which you as a communicator send a message is important, whether it is typing a text or an e-mail, hand-scrawling a note, or communicating by voice in person or by phone or videoconference. This means is the  medium, the pathway by which a message travels:

· Sender [Encoding] → Message [Medium] Message → [Decoding] Receiver

Feedback

“Flight 123, do you copy?” In the movies, that’s what you hear the flight controller say when radioing the pilot of a troubled aircraft to see whether he or she received (“copied”) the previous message. And the pilot may radio back, “Roger,Page 506 Houston, I copy.” This acknowledgment is an example of  feedback, whereby the receiver expresses his or her reaction to the sender’s message.

Feedback is essential in communication so that the person sending the message can know whether the receiver understood it in the same way the sender intended—and whether he or she agrees with it. It is an essential component of communication accuracy and can be facilitated by paraphrasing.  Paraphrasing  occurs when people restate in their words the crux of what they heard or read. It clarifies that a message was accurately understood. If you want to ensure that someone understands something you said, ask him or her to paraphrase your message.

Noise

Unfortunately, the entire communication process can be disrupted at several different points by  noise—any disturbance that interferes with the transmission of a message. Noise can occur in the medium, of course, in the form of static in a radio transmission, fadeout on a cell phone, or loud music when you’re trying to talk in a restaurant. Or it can occur in the encoding or decoding, as when people from different cultures stumble over each other’s languages. One of your authors—Angelo Kinicki—was consulting in Asia and found, for instance, that his suggestion that Asian managers “touch base” with their colleagues drew blank looks. We discuss cross-cultural barriers to communication later in the chapter.

Even within the same culture, we can encounter semantic problems (problems that revolve around the meaning of words). When a supervisor tells you, “We need to get this done right away,” what does it mean? Does “We” mean just you? You and your coworkers? Or you, your coworkers, and the boss? Does “right away” mean today, tomorrow, or next week? 

Another language barrier is jargon.  Jargon  is terminology specific to a particular profession or group. (Example: “The HR VP wants the RFP to go out ASAP.” Translation: “The vice president of human resources wants the request for proposal to go out as soon as possible.”) Buzzwords are designed to impress rather than inform. (Example: “Could our teams interface on the ad campaign that went viral, and then circle back with the boss?”) 5  Noise also occurs in nonverbal communication (discussed later in this chapter), when our physical movements and our words send different messages.

EXAMPLE

Secrecy and Silence

The recent revelation that about 11 million Jettas, Beetles, Golfs, and other Volkswagen cars were equipped at the factory with the means to cheat a federal emissions test has dragged down the high-flying company’s fortunes. CEO Martin Winterkorn resigned, and Mattias Mueller has taken his place. Mueller blames the company’s insular character and what some have called a “culture of silence” for preventing employees at many levels from speaking out about a clear violation of the law that went on for about 10 years.

Volkswagen is conducting its own internal investigation of the cheating scandal, but it seems clear that several high-ranking executives knew employees had decided to install the emissions software, to cover up the fact that they could not meet standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency. Prosecutors in Germany, where the company is headquartered, say Winterkorn received a memo about “irregularities” in the cars’ emissions at least a year before a U.S. nonprofit group discovered what was going on. Whether he read it has not been made clear. 6  

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Martin Winterkorn. Dr. Martin Winterkorn resigned as Volkswagen’s CEO in September 2015 after the Environmental Protection Agency began investigating emission test issues.© Bernhard Classen/Alamy Elizabeth Holmes. Elizabeth Holmes, CEO of Theranos, speaking to Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Conference. The company received sanctions from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, leading the company to close its laboratory operations. The company is now focusing on selling miniature medical testing machines.© Krista Kennell/Shutterstock RF

Secrecy was an operational mandate at Theranos, Inc., a biomedical testing company founded by CEO Elizabeth Holmes. Different departments had separate key cards for entry, and the company’s chemists and engineers were discouraged from discussing their work, even with one another. The resulting “silo” effect prevented staff from collaborating to solve problems with the company’s blood-testing products, which failed to live up to Holmes’s public claims that they would be innovative. 

As multiple investigations into the company began, Holmes continued to deny problems with Theranos products, keeping up the positive spin that had earned the company early praise. She falsely claimed that a 2015 product recall ordered by the FDA was voluntary and even gave allegedly inaccurate presentations to employees, failing to say that many Theranos products were only in the research stage. Employees didn’t learn the extent of the company’s troubles until investigators’ reports were released to the press. Their confidence in Holmes waned, and the government’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Research recently shut the company’s flagship laboratory and banned Holmes from owning or running a lab for two years. Federal and SEC investigations and civil suits are ongoing. 7

YOUR CALL

In terms of the communications process modeled in  Figure 15.1 , do you think a “culture of silence” can constitute a form of noise? What about the “silo” effect? At what other point or points in the communication model do you think silence and secrecy can interfere with communication? Where do they seem to have operated at Volkswagen and Theranos?

Selecting the Right Medium for Effective Communication

All kinds of communications tools are available to managers, ranging from one-to-one face-to-face conversation all the way to use of the mass media. However, managers need to know how to use the right tool for the right condition—when to use e-mail or when to meet face-to-face, for example. Should you congratulate a team for exceeding its goals by addressing the group in person, sending an e-mail, posting an announcement near the office coffee machine—or all three? What medium would you select for delivering a reprimand?

All media have their own advantages and disadvantages, and there are a few different criteria to consider when choosing the right medium. 8  For instance, texts and tweets require the writer to be brief and precise, and like e-mails (which should also be brief), they provide a record of the communication that in-person and phone communication don’t. They can also be sent almost without regard to time-zone differences. But unlike voice, video call, and in-person messages, written communications often fail to convey nuances of meaning through tone of voice and body language, and thusPage 508 they can more easily be misinterpreted. Many a manager has discovered that a simple phone call can cut through layers of misinterpreted e-mails. 

We can generally categorize differences between communication media in terms of whether a given medium is rich or lean. What does this mean?

Is a Medium Rich or Lean in Information?

Media richness  indicates how well a particular medium conveys information and promotes learning. That is, the “richer” a medium is, the better it is at conveying information. 9  The term media richness was proposed by respected organizational theorists Richard Daft and Robert Lengel as part of their contingency model for media selection. 10

Types of media can be positioned along a continuum ranging from high to low media richness, as follows:

Face-to-face communication, also the most personal form of communication, is the richest. It allows the receiver of the message to observe multiple cues, such as body language and tone of voice. It allows the sender to get immediate feedback, to see how well the receiver comprehended the message. At the other end of the media richness scale, impersonal written media are just the reverse—only one cue and no feedback—making them low in richness.

As you might expect, people have preferences for the type of medium they like to use. For example, males and people with extroverted and agreeable personality characteristics tend to use media high in richness. Contrary to stereotypes, age has no impact on media richness preference. 11  What are your preferences?

Matching the Appropriate Medium to the Appropriate Situation

In general, use the following guidelines. 12

Rich Medium: Best for Nonroutine Situations and to Avoid Oversimplification

A rich medium is more effective with nonroutine situations. Examples: In what way would you like your boss to inform you of a nonroutine change, like the introduction of a new employee benefit you can take advantage of? Via a memo tacked on the bulletin board (a lean medium)? Or via a face-to-face meeting or phone call (a rich medium)?

The danger of using a rich medium for routine matters (such as monthly sales reports) is that it results in information overloading—the delivery of more information than necessary.

Lean Medium: Best for Routine Situations and to Avoid Overloading

A lean medium is more effective in routine situations. Examples: In what manner would you as a sales manager like to get routine monthly sales reports from your 50 sales reps? Via time-consuming phone calls (a somewhat rich medium)? Or via e-mails or text messages (a somewhat lean medium)? The danger of using a lean medium for nonroutine matters (such as an announcement of a company reorganization) is that it results in information oversimplification—it doesn’t provide enough of the information the receiver needs and wants.

E-mail and Facebook and Twitter messages (social media, discussed in  Section 15.4 ) vary in media richness, being leaner if they impersonally blanket a large audience and richer if they mix personal textual and video information that prompts quick conversational feedback. 13  ●

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15.2

How Managers Fit into the Communication Process

MAJOR QUESTION How can I use the different channels and patterns of communication to my advantage?

THE BIG PICTURE

Formal communication channels follow the chain of command, which is of three types—vertical, horizontal, and external. Informal communication channels develop outside the organization’s formal structure. One type is the grapevine. Another, face-to-face communication, builds trust and depends heavily on managers’ effective listening skills.

If you’ve ever had a low-level job in nearly any kind of organization, you know that there is generally a hierarchy of management between you and the organization’s president, director, or CEO. If you had a suggestion that you wanted him or her to hear, you doubtless had to go up through management channels. That’s formal communication. However, you may have run into that top manager in the elevator. Or in the restroom. Or in a line at the bank. You could have voiced your suggestion casually then. That’s informal communication.

Formal Communication Channels: Up, Down, Sideways, and Outward

Formal communication channels  follow the chain of command and are recognized as official. The organization chart we described in  Chapter 8  indicates how official communications—memos, letters, reports, announcements—are supposed to be routed.

Formal communication is of three types: (1) vertical—meaning upward and downward, (2) horizontal—meaning laterally (sideways), and (3) external—meaning outside the organization.

1. Vertical Communication: Up and Down the Chain of Command

Vertical communication is the flow of messages up and down the hierarchy within the organization: bosses communicating with subordinates, subordinates communicating with bosses. As you might expect, the more management levels through which a message passes, the more it is prone to some distortion.

Upward bound. How do you communicate with a manager two or three levels above you in the organization’s hierarchy? You can send a memo through channels. Or you can watch for informal opportunities like this when a manager heads for a cup of coffee. © Jacobs Stock Photography/Getty Images RF

· Page 510Downward communication—from top to bottom.  Downward communication  flows from a higher level to a lower level (or levels). In small organizations, top-down communication may be delivered face-to-face. In larger organizations, it’s delivered via meetings, e-mail, official memos, and company publications.

· Upward communication—from bottom to top.  Upward communication  flows from a lower level to a higher level(s). Often this type of communication is from a subordinate to his or her immediate manager, who in turn will relay it up to the next level, if necessary. Effective upward communication depends on an atmosphere of trust. No subordinate is going to want to be the bearer of bad news to a manager who is always negative and bad-tempered.

Types of downward and upward communication are shown below. (See  Table 15.1 .)

TABLE 15.1 Types of Downward and Upward Communication

Downward Communication Most downward communication involves one of the following kinds of information:

· Instructions related to particular job tasks. Example (supervisor to subordinate): “The store will close Monday for inventory. All employees are expected to participate.”

· Explanations about the relationship between two or more tasks. Example: “While taking inventory, employees need to see what things are missing. Most of that might be attributable to shoplifting.”

· Explanations of the organization’s policies, practices, and procedures. Example: “The human resources department sends an e-mail blast about new benefits or procedures for taking vacations.”

· A manager’s feedback about a subordinate’s performance. Example: “You missed the project deadline by two days. What caused you to be late?”

· Attempts to encourage a sense of mission and dedication to the organization’s goals. Example: “Manager calls team meeting to discuss how the team is contributing to company’s strategic goals.”

Upward Communication Most upward communication involves the following kinds of information:

· Reports of progress on current projects. Example: “We are three hours behind in taking inventory. What can we do to catch up?”

· Reports of unsolved problems requiring help from people higher up. Example: “We can’t make our merchandise count jibe with the stock reports.”

· New developments affecting the work unit. Example: “Two employees want to take vacation the same week. How would you like to handle this?”

· Suggestions for improvements. Example: “I don’t have the software needed to create the customer survey.”

· Reports on employee attitudes and efficiency. Example: “Our customer satisfaction scores have gone down over the last year. Let’s schedule a department meeting to create a plan of action.”

Sources: Adapted from D. Katz and R. Kahn, The Social Psychology of Organizations (New York: Wiley, 1966); and E. Planty and W. Machaver, “Upward Communications: A Project in Executive Development,” Personnel Vol. 28 (1952), pp. 304–318.

2. Horizontal Communication: Within and between Work Units

Horizontal communication  flows within and between work units; its main purpose is coordination. As a manager, you will spend perhaps as much as a third of your time in this form of communication—consulting with colleagues and coworkers at the same level as you within the organization. In this kind of sideways communication, you will be sharing information, coordinating tasks, solving problems, resolving conflicts, and getting the support of your peers. Horizontal communication is encouraged through the use of meetings, committees, task forces, and matrix structures.

Horizontal communication can be impeded in three ways: (1) by specialization that makes people focus on only their jobs; (2) by rivalry between workers or work units, which prevents sharing of information; and (3) by lack of encouragement from management.

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3. External Communication: Outside the Organization

External communication  flows between people inside and outside the organization. This form of communication is increasingly important because organizations desire to communicate with other stakeholders—customers, suppliers, shareholders, or other owners—in pursuit of their strategic goals. Small business owners particularly rely on external communication to help grow their businesses. A recent study, for example, revealed that small business owners tended to seek input or counsel from two sources: peers in the same community or online from a peer they had never met. 14

Informal Communication Channels

Informal communication channels  develop outside the formal structure and do not follow the chain of command—they are more spontaneous, can skip management levels, and can cut across lines of authority.

Two types of informal channels are (1) the grapevine and (2) face-to-face communication. 

The Grapevine

The  grapevine  is the unofficial communication system of the informal organization, a network of in-person and online gossip and rumor. It is never silent and is not always accurate. But research shows that the grapevine delivers as much as 70% of all organizational communication, although only a little more than half of executives understand that the rumor mill is more active when official communication is lacking. In a recent series of interviews with 1,100 employees in a range of industries, almost half said that when official and unofficial communications conflict, they are more likely to believe the grapevine. Written or online company communications, such as e-mails and newsletters, edged out the grapevine, but only slightly; 51% of those interviewed said they trusted a newsletter more than rumor. 15

As public speaker and communications coach Carol Kinsey Goman says, “Social media has put the grapevine on steroids. You can’t outrun [the] rumor mill and you can’t kill it. The challenge is to understand how the grapevine works within your organization—and how you can most effectively influence it.” 16  

Face-to-Face Communication

Despite the entrenched use of quick and efficient electronic communication in our lives, face-to-face conversation is still justifiably a major part of most people’s work day. Employees value authentic human contact with the boss and welcome the implication that their manager cares about them. Face time builds relationships and trust, shows respect for employees as individuals, and thus is highly motivating. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings doesn’t have an office at all. “I just had no need for it,” he says. “It is better for me to be meeting people all around the building.” 17  And as one writer noted, while Millennials may spend a lot of time texting, a major reason is that they’re making plans to get together in person. 18  

Some basic principles apply to making the most of face-to-face communication in the work environment. 19  

1. Make time for face-to-face. Rather than hoping to catch people at random, schedule time with individual employees, and make sure you’ll both be free of distractions (including cell phones) for the few minutes your interaction will take. This is not the moment to multi-task.

2. Listen more and talk less. Listen not just to the words the other person is saying but also to the emotional content behind the words. Make eye contact and observe body language. This will help you be empathetic, a topic discussed in the last section of this chapter. When it’s your turn to speak, be brief. If your message is specific or factual, prepare your facts and outline your thoughts ahead of time. Expect questions and be prepared with answers.

3. Deliver good news up front; lead in to bad. Happy tidings don’t require a long build-up. Bad news and controversial decisions, however, may go over better if you build up to them by explaining the situation, identifying factorsPage 512 you can’t control, and giving the other side of the argument its due.

4. Hold employee town hall meetings. For in-person meetings with groups of employees, “town hall” meetings, often held monthly or quarterly, usually consist of a presentation by managers and an open question-and-answer session. Be available for informal conversations with individuals afterwards. Town hall meetings are a great way for politicians to communicate with their constituents. 20

A town hall meeting. U.S. President Barack Obama (left) and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (right) talk to Facebook employees at a town hall meeting at corporate headquarters in Palo Alto, California. Why would a president of the U.S. want to participate in such events?© Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

5. Use webcasts when you can’t be there. You can still achieve face time even if your employees work remotely. Use webcasts, video conferencing, or a social video portal to keep communications direct and personal. If possible, try to make sure everyone has the same communication experience. That is, try to avoid having meetings that mix in-person and remote attendees. 

PRACTICAL ACTION

How to Streamline Meetings

Managers spend a great deal of time in meetings—too much time, according to most. In fact, mid-level managers average more than 20 meetings a week, 21  and workers reportedly judge nearly 50% of their meetings to be a waste of time. 22  Productive meetings are short, held in convenient locations away from distraction, and attended by only the people who will be most directly affected by decisions made or who can contribute most usefully to problem solutions. Here are some other ways to make sure the meetings you run or attend, whether virtually or in person, are as brief and effective as possible. 23

What to Do as a Meeting Leader

1. Set a clear goal and communicate it beforehand. Before you call a meeting, ask yourself what specific task or tasks you want the meeting to accomplish. Write these down in the form of an agenda with time limits for each point, leaving brief time slots for attendees’ input and discussion. At least a day beforehand, share the agenda with everyone invited to attend.

2. Start and end on time. Respect other people’s time commitments. Be the first in the meeting room and start when you said you would. Stick to the time limits you’ve allowed for each agenda item, and keep your eye on the clock. Learn how to gently but firmly cut off unproductive discussion. (“Thanks for your contribution, Jay. Let’s quickly hear from one more person before we move on to the next point.”)

3. Consider frequent, short meetings rather than infrequent, long ones. People focus better during meetings of an hour or less and feel more energized afterwards to accomplish the goals they’ve been assigned. They also find it easier to make time for short meetings than to give up an entire morning or afternoon. 

4. Follow up. Within 24 hours of the meeting, clarify results and expectations by sending attendees a summary of decisions made, tasks to be performed, and who is to perform them and when.

What to Do as a Meeting Participant

1. Prepare. Respond promptly to the meeting invitation. Read the agenda (ask for one if you don’t receive it ahead of time), and be prepared with any facts or data you may be called upon to present. Turn off your cell phone or leave it behind. 

2. Be on time. Showing up late is disrespectful and disruptive. It can also make the meeting run over time if the leader decides to wait for you.

3. Participate intelligently. Expect to contribute to the meeting, but make sure your contributions are brief, professional, and on point. Don’t start distracting side conversations with other participants; support the leader by focusing your attention on him or her so the meeting can end on time.

4. Follow up. If you came away from the meeting with a to-do list, be sure you act on it in a timely way so the goals of the meeting can be achieved. You may even be able to avoid having to attend another meeting to go over the same agenda all over again.

YOUR CALL

What can you add to these suggestions to make meetings run better? For more about running meetings, go to  EffectiveMeetings.com  ( www.effectivemeetings.com ).

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15.3

Barriers to Communication

MAJOR QUESTION What are the important barriers I need to be aware of, so I can improve my communication skills?

THE BIG PICTURE

We describe several barriers to communication. Physical barriers include sound, time, and space. Personal barriers include variations in communication skills, processing and interpreting information, trustworthiness and credibility, ego strength, listening skills, judging others, and generational considerations. Cross-cultural barriers are a greater challenge as more jobs include interactions with others around the globe. Nonverbal communication can present a barrier if it conflicts with the spoken message. Finally, gender differences can present barriers but can be overcome. 

If you have ever been served the wrong drink because the server couldn’t hear you in a noisy bar, clicked on a broken web link, missed your boarding call because the airport’s public address system was full of static, or taken offense at a text you later found you misinterpreted, you’ve experienced a barrier to communication. Some barriers occur within the communication process itself, as shown below. (See  Table 15.2 .) We’ll look at several types–physical, personal, cross-cultural, nonverbal, and gender differences.

TABLE 15.2 Some Barriers That Happen within the Communication Process All it takes is one blocked step in the communication process for communication to fail. Consider the following.

· Sender barrier—no message gets sent. Example: If a manager has an idea but is afraid to voice it because he or she fears criticism, then obviously no message gets sent.

· Encoding barrier—the message is not expressed correctly. Example: If your vocabulary is lacking or English is not your first language, you may have difficulty expressing to a supervisor, coworker, or subordinate what it is you mean to say.

· Medium barrier—the communication channel is blocked. Example: When someone’s phone always has a busy signal or a computer network is down, these are instances of the communication medium being blocked.

· Decoding barrier—the recipient doesn’t understand the message. Example: You pulled an all-nighter traveling back from spring break and today your brain is fuzzy and unfocused during class lectures.

· Receiver barrier—no message gets received. Example: Because you were texting during a class lecture, you weren’t listening when the professor announced a new assignment due to tomorrow.

· Feedback barrier—the recipient doesn’t respond enough. Example: You give some people street directions, but since they only nod their heads and don’t repeat the directions back to you, you don’t really know whether you were understood.

1. Physical Barriers: Sound, Time, Space

Try shouting at someone over the roar of earth-moving machinery on a construction site and you know what physical communication barriers are. Other such barriers are time-zone differences, telephone-line static, and crashed computers. Office design can be a physical barrier, too, if it isolates people in cubicles or surrounds them with noisy open space that makes conversation difficult.

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Amazon hopes its new headquarters in downtown Seattle will be an enabler of communication. The ambitious complex will consist of a collection of buildings centered around three high-tech greenhouses filled with 3,000 species of plants, many of which are endangered or even extinct in the wild. The greenhouse “spheres” will bring the outdoors in and offer treehouse-style meeting rooms, suspension bridges, walls made of vines, and an indoor creek. “The whole idea,” says the project’s lead architect, “was to get people to think more creatively.” 24

2. Personal Barriers: Individual Attributes That Hinder Communication

“Is it them or is it me?” How often have you wondered, when someone has shown a surprising response to something you said, how the miscommunication happened? Let’s examine seven personal barriers that contribute to miscommunication.

Variable Skills in Communicating Effectively

Some people are simply better communicators than others. They have the vocabulary, the writing ability, the speaking skills, the facial expressions, the eye contact, the dramatic ability, the “gift of gab,” the social skills to express themselves in a superior way. But better communication skills can be learned. 25  The final section in this chapter discusses a variety of ways you can improve your communication effectiveness.

Variations in the Way We Process and Interpret Information 

Are you from a working-class or a privileged background? Are you from a particular ethnic group? Because communication is a perceptual process in which people use different frames of reference and experiences to interpret the world around them, they are selective about what things have meaning to them and what don’t. These differences affect what we say and what we think we hear.

What differentiates effective communicators, according to communications expert Zamira Jones, is their understanding that ensuring the receiver’s correct interpretation of the intended message is up to the sender. “Effective communication is defined by the receiver. If your receiver fails to understand your message, it is your fault, not theirs.” 26  

Variations in Trustworthiness and Credibility

Without trust between you and the other person, communication is apt to be flawed. Instead of communicating, both of you will be concentrating on defensive tactics, not the meaning of the message being exchanged. In the end, low trust damages communication, which in turn reduces outcomes like job satisfaction, creativity, collaboration, and performance. 27

The solution, says writer Martin Zwilling, is to work on relationships first. “When people are listening to someone with confidence and trust, there is a predisposition to hear the message and agree.” 28    

Oversized Egos

Our egos—our pride, our self-esteem, even arrogance—are a fourth barrier. Egos can cause political battles, turf wars, and the passionate pursuit of power, credit, and resources. They influence the way we treat each other and how receptive we are to being influenced by others. 

Too much ego—the trait of narcissism—is a handicap, but so is too little. Some successful leaders and communicators are what one expert calls “productive narcissists,” such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. 29  But for most of us, a little perspective on our ego is in order. Most of the time, it’s not about us, and that’s a good thing. 30

Faulty Listening Skills

Do you find your mind wandering over the course of a day? Do you forget people’s names shortly after meeting them? These are signs ofPage 515 mindlessness.  Mindlessness  is a state of reduced attention. It is expressed in behavior that is rigid, or thoughtless. 31  Life’s dynamics put all of us into occasional states of mindlessness. Our brains simply can’t keep up with all the stimuli we receive, according to noted psychiatrist Edward Hallowell. “Never in history has the human brain been asked to track so many data points,” Hallowell says. He believes overloading of our brains is a primary cause of poor listening and poor performance at school and work. “We’re simply expecting more of our brains than they have the energy to handle.” 32

Another barrier to listening, ironically, is cell phones. If we’re looking at our screens all the time, how can we really be listening to those who are right before us? 33

Tendency to Judge Others’ Messages

Some people assume the phrase “Black Lives Matter” is meant to imply that only black lives matter, while others believe the rejoinder “All Lives Matter” is intended to negate the value of black lives. In fact, neither belief is true. The point is that we all have a natural tendency, according to psychologist Carl Rogers, to judge others’ statements from our own point of view (especially if we have strong feelings about the issue). 34

Generational Differences

If you’ve tried to teach an older relative how to text or use Facebook, you may have some appreciation for how difficult it can be for older generations to adapt to new technologies. On the other hand, Senator Bernie Sanders, 74, maintains an active Twitter feed with 2.2 million followers. 35  

Younger people themselves differ in their use of and preferences for different forms of communication. For example, Patty Baxter, publisher at Metro Guide Publishing in Halifax, Nova Scotia, urged her sales reps, all under 35, to use the phone rather than e-mail to reach potential clients. As you might expect, the reps preferred the convenience of e-mail, but sales were down without the personal touch of a phone call. 

In contrast, Kevin Castle, 32-year-old chief technology officer at Technossus in Irvine, California, keeps his office phone in a cabinet, unplugged, believing that being respectful of others’ needs means e-mailing first before making a potentially intrusive phone call. 36

And for Brit Morin, CEO and founder of Brit + Co., a media and e-commerce platform based in San Francisco, e-mail is outdated. Morin says, “Half my team doesn’t use email anymore. … The Gen X and older generations—they’re not adopting Slack [an internal communications platform] and they’re missing out on a lot of community and information that might be useful in their jobs.” 37  

3. Cross-Cultural Barriers

Culture  “encompasses the ideas, values, practices, and material objects that allow a group of people, even an entire society, to carry out their collective lives in relative order and harmony.” 38

Because the norms and beliefs of our culture are so deeply ingrained in our thoughts and behaviors, culture naturally affects the way we communicate, both with those who share that culture and especially with those from other cultures. One obvious reason is that language differences often exist. For example, jokes and humor are very much linked to culture. 39  One of your authors found that good American jokes don’t necessarily get laughs in Europe, Asia, and Scandanavia. Even the United States and Great Britain, whose cultures share many elements, are often said to be “two countries divided by a common language” (an ironic observation often attributed to the British playwright George Bernard Shaw).

Other causes of cultural differences that can impede communication are nonverbal signs and symbols (such as crossed fingers or thumbs-up, which mean very different things around the world), prejudice and bias, religious and other beliefs, and the tendency to value our own culture above all others, called ethnocentrism. 40  

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This barrier has been partially overcome via cross-cultural communication training. 41  In Brooklyn, New York, for example, where the population of Chinese immigrants has increased 50% since 2000, Midwood Ambulance, a private ambulance company run by an Italian-American family, recently began hiring Chinese-speaking health care workers to staff three ambulances with lettering in Chinese and English on their sides. The response was so positive that three more ambulances have been ordered. “The fact that I can speak their language was a tremendous help,” said Jason Lau, a medical technician who helped deliver a Chinese couple’s baby on the way to the hospital. 42  Help with training is available from the American Ambulance Association, which just published its first handbook for cross-cultural communication. The handbook cites barriers to communication, key communication tips for EMTs and paramedics, and cultural norms to be aware of. 43

Cross-cultural training is particularly important for expatriates, or employees working abroad. Success in such assignments can hinge on the employee’s adaptability and cultural awareness. Preparation is the key. Says Scott T. Sullivan, executive vice president of Brookfield Global Relocation Services, “Our research indicates that one of the top 5 causes of assignment failure is the inability to adapt, which can be substantially prevented with cultural training.” 44

4. Nonverbal Communication: How Unwritten and Unspoken Messages May Mislead

Nonverbal communication  consists of messages sent outside of the written or spoken word. We primarily express nonverbal communication through (1) eye contact, (2) facial expressions, (3) body movements and gestures, and (4) touch. 45  Some research suggests that about 55% of what we communicate is transmitted nonverbally. 46   

1. Eye Contact

Westerners use eye contact to signal the beginning and end of a conversation, to reflect interest and attention, and to convey both honesty and respect. Most people from Western cultures tend to avoid eye contact when conveying bad news or negative feedback. Asians, however, lower their eyes to show respect, while members of Latin cultures do so to show remorse. 47  Interpreting these nonverbal communications as evasive behavior will lead to misunderstanding. 48

2. Facial Expressions

You’re probably used to thinking that smiling represents warmth, happiness, or friendship, whereas frowning represents dissatisfaction or anger. But people in some cultures are less openly demonstrative than people in the United States. 49  The Japanese, for example, feel those in the United States smile too much and too broadly. They themselves may smile, slightly, when angry or embarrassed, as well as when happy. Before the 2008 Beijing Olympics, to accommodate Western visitors, both Chinese and Russian officials at the Games were trained to smile more than they are accustomed to do. 50

Bored or tired? People’s behavior doesn’t always reflect what’s going on around them. It may reflect what’s going on inside of them. Perhaps this man on the right was up late the night before with a sick child or working to meet a project deadline. Even so, when speaking, you need to watch your audience for their reactions.© mediaphotos/Getty Images RFPage 517

3. Body Movements and Gestures

Open body positions, such as leaning slightly backward, express openness, warmth, closeness, and availability for communication. Closed body positions, such as folded arms or crossed legs, represent defensiveness. Angling your body away from the other person generally makes you look disinterested. 51  You can use these conclusions to improve relationships with others.

A recent experimental study demonstrated the power of using positive, defensive, or no hand gestures when communicating. Participants were shown a video of a leader giving a speech while displaying either positive (community hands—palms facing up, humility—hands clasped at waist level, and steepling—hands form a steeple with fingertips touching), defensive (hands in pockets, crossed arms, hands clasped behind the back), or no hand gestures (keeping hands at one’s side). They then rated the extent to which they liked the leader and their positive emotions toward the person. Results showed that people had more positive reactions and emotions toward leaders employing positive hand gestures. 52

But keep in mind that interpretations of body language can depend on context and culture. For instance, waving your hand with your palm facing away from you means “good-bye” in the United States but “come here” in Korea. 53  

4. Touch

Norms for touching vary significantly around the world. For example, kissing on the cheek, patting on the shoulder, and embracing may be appropriate in the U.S., but many people in Asia find these actions offensive. 54

Western women tend to use touching of other women to show friendship or sympathy, whereas men are less likely to touch other men and more likely to associate being touched with sexual behavior. 55  Other cultures are often more conservative about the use of touch between men and women. 

The table below gives some suggestions for better nonverbal communication skills. (See  Table 15.3 .)

TABLE 15.3 Toward Better Nonverbal Communication Skills You can practice these skills by watching TV with the sound off and interpreting people’s emotions and interactions.

DO …	DON’T …
Maintain eye contact	Look away from the speaker
Lean toward the speaker	Turn away from the speaker
Speak at a moderate rate	Speak too quickly or slowly
Speak in a quiet, reassuring tone	Speak in an unpleasant tone
Smile and show animation	Yawn excessively
Occasionally nod your head in agreement	Close your eyes
Be aware of your facial expressions	Lick your lips, bite your nails, play with your hair

Source: Adapted from P. Preston, “Nonverbal Communication: Do You Really Say What You Mean?” Journal of Healthcare Management, March–April 2005, pp. 83–86.

5. Gender Differences 

Women and men process language in different parts of the brain, so perhaps it’s not surprising that gender differences in communication exist. 56  A recent series of more than 100,000 interviews with male and female executives revealed some of thesePage 518 differences. For instance, women view questioning as their best contribution and use questions to spark ideas, build consensus, and show concern for others. Men think women ask too many questions. They tend to interpret them as barriers to progress or signs of overly controlling behavior. 57  

Exchange of views? Men and women have different communication styles. How effective do you think you are at communicating with the opposite sex?© Yuri_Arcurs/Getty Images

Many women often feel excluded during meetings and discussions, while about 90% of men feel women have equal opportunities to contribute. Both have a point; women prefer to be asked to participate, while men assume someone who doesn’t voluntarily speak up simply has nothing to say. 58

Because stress heightens different hormones in men and in women, men tend to withdraw and isolate themselves when problem solving, whereas women seek out others for support and can interpret men’s withdrawing as lack of caring. 59

Some possible general differences in communication between genders are summarized below. (See  Table 15.4 .) Note, however, that these don’t apply in all cases, which would constitute stereotyping.

TABLE 15.4  Gender and Communication Differences: How Do Men and Women Differ?

COMMUNICATION CHARACTERISTIC	MEN	WOMEN
Taking credit	Greater use of “I” statements (e.g., “I did this” and “I did that); more likely to boast about their achievements	Greater use of “We” statements, (e.g., “We did this” and “We did that”); less likely to boast about their achievements
Displaying confidence	Less likely to indicate that they are uncertain about an issue	Mostly likely to indicate a lack of certainty about an issue
Being polite	More likely to appear certain and definitive	Greater use of qualifiers and hedging
Focus of messaging	Focused on self and more likely to mention “Me” or “I”	Focused on other person and more likely to mention “We” or “You”
Talking patterns	More apt to interrupt women and talk over others	Less apt to interrupt men and talk over others
Listening	More likely to take in words and content, less likely to use positive overlaps such as “Yea” or “I see” to demonstrate listening	More likely to hear words and the emotions behind them, more likely to use positive overlaps such as “I agree” or “That’s right” to demonstrate listening
Nonverbal patterns	Less expressive (e.g., smile less) and focus more on words than nonverbal cues, less likely to touch	More expressive (e.g., smile more) and skilled at deciphering nonverbal cues, more likely to touch
Answering questions	Quick and to the point	Tend to provide more information than needed
Using emoticons	Use emoticons more often to express sarcasm and banter	Use smiling and laughing emoticons more than men

Source: Derived from A. Nelson and C.D. Brown, The Gender Communication Handbook (San Francisco, CA: Pfeiffer, 2012); and D. Tannen, You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation (New York: Ballantine Books, 1990).

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Deborah Tannen recommends that everyone become aware of how differing linguistic styles affect our perceptions and judgments. A  linguistic style  is a person’s characteristic speaking patterns—pacing, pausing, directness, word choice, and use of questions, jokes, stories, apologies, and similar devices. For example, in a meeting, regardless of gender, “those who are comfortable speaking up in groups, who need little or no silence before raising their hands, or who speak out easily without waiting to be recognized are more apt to be heard,” she says. “Those who refrain from talking until it’s clear that the previous speaker is finished, who wait to be recognized, and who are inclined to link their comments to those of others will do fine at a meeting where everyone else is following the same rules but will have a hard time getting heard in a meeting with people whose styles are more like the first pattern.” 60

EXAMPLE 

How Can Men and Women Communicate Better at Work? 

Are the communication differences between men and women an unbridgeable gap? Few experts think so. Here are some suggestions for both men and women to become more aware of gender differences and try closing the gap. 61  

1. Recognize hidden bias. Everyone has biases where gender is concerned, including the notion that there are only two genders. Examining unacknowledged prejudices is the first step in overcoming them.

2. Allow for different communication styles. There is no one “best” way for anyone to communicate. Men may focus on “I” statements, while women may qualify their contributions, but these differences should not influence the group’s assessment of the value of the messages. Men can acknowledge that women are motivated to be inclusive, for instance, while women can recognize that it’s sometimes more important to men to just get the job done. It’s not usually personal.

3. Remember that everyone wants to feel that his or her contribution matters. Listening is the most important communication skill. Being open-minded and attentive and avoiding snap judgments when others speak are good rules for all to follow. Really listening means you are not planning and rehearsing your response while the other person is still speaking.

4. Step out of your comfort zone. Women can try being more assertive in groups and meetings, while men can be more willing to listen and interrupt less. Women can try taking an ad hoc approach to problem solving, while men can look for more overt ways to include others in the process while asking questions along the way. 

YOUR CALL

Do you think it is possible to adapt our preferred communication styles? Why or why not? How would this kind of adaptation improve communication at work?

The 2016 Presidential debates underscored communication differences between men and women. In this town hall debate at Washington University, Donald Trump regularly stood behind Hillary Clinton in this manner. What message was he sending by behaving in this regard? Trump clearly exhibited several of the male communication characteristics shown in  Table 15.4  such as taking credit, displaying confidence, being less polite, talking patterns, and answering questions. Clinton similarly used the female characteristics pertaining to taking credit, focus of messaging, listening, and nonverbal patterns.© Pool/Getty Images

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15.4

Social Media and Management

MAJOR QUESTION How do contemporary managers use social media to communicate more effectively?

THE BIG PICTURE

We discuss social media and their use by employees and managers. We look at the impact of social media on managers’ and organizations’ effectiveness, including applications to recruiting, productivity, sales, innovation, and reputation management. We also consider the costs of social media use, such as the effects of cyberloafing and the need to manage e-mail, as well as growing concerns about security and privacy. We look at the use of texting in organizations, and finally at the implications for managers of setting social media policy.

Social media, which use web-based and mobile technologies to generate interactive dialogue with members of a network, are woven into every aspect of our lives. We begin our exploration of these technologies by documenting their general use. We then examine the effects of social media on managerial and organizational effectiveness, review the downside of social media, discuss the key impacts of texting on management and organizational behavior, and discuss the need for organizations to develop social media policies.

Social Media Is Changing the Fabric of Our Lives  

The widespread use of social media is changing our personal lives and the very nature of how businesses operate and the principles of management. A recent survey of 9,200 travelers across 31 countries, for example, provides insight into the impact of social media in our lives. Eighty-one percent reported that they would rather travel with their mobile devices than with a loved one. 62  From a business perspective, Facebook’s new live streaming feature may not yet rival its main social media site in popularity, but it has already attracted small business users who compare its features and benefits with that of Periscope, a similar application from Twitter. Despite some differences, both channels allow business managers to reach and interact with customers in new ways. 63  Researchers suggest that application of such tools can increase a company’s brand awareness and sales. 64

Besides the business application of social media, it is affecting our lives in countless other ways. Consider, for example, when Republican representatives cut off the live television feed in the House at the end of a legislative session in June 2016. The Democrats who had been pressing for a vote on gun control legislation refused to leave the chamber and used Periscope to stream their impromptu sit-in via cell phone. They held their ground for about 36 hours as C-Span picked up the feed and the legislators’ protest went viral. 65  And, with undoubtedly profound implications for law enforcement, gun control, and race relations in the United States, Diamond Reynolds stunned the world in 2016 when she live-streamed on Facebook the fatal shooting by police of her boyfriend, Philandro Castile, who had been pulled over for a broken tail light and died in the emergency room. Within a few days the video had been viewed 3.2 million times on Reynolds’s page alone. 66

What does data suggest about the use of social media?  Figure 15.2  shows the usage of various social networks across all age groups. Although some differences across age cohorts exist, it appears all age groups use these tools, underscoring the need for managers to use social media tools with employees of all ages.

FIGURE 15.2 Age distribution at the top social networks

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Source: M. Hoelzel, Business Insider Australia, June 3, 2015, “Social Network Demographics: Here’s who’s on Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and Other Top Social Networks Now,”  http://www.businessinsider.com.au/update-a-breakdown-of-the-demographics-for-each-of-the-different-social-networks-2015-6?r=US&IR=T .

A recent survey of more than 3,500 professionals in France, Germany, Japan, Spain, the UK, and the United States documented their use of mobile devices at work. Results showed

· 60% check or send personal e-mail at least once a day.

· 57% send personal text messages at least once a day.

· 53% make personal voice calls at least once a day.

· 50% check or use social media at least once a day. 67

It’s no wonder, then, that the communications capabilities of social media continue to grow and expand, and that managers need to keep up with their increasing potential.

Moreover, those whose businesses are global, for instance, are using social medial platforms to reach audiences in developing countries around the world. And it’s not just a matter of mastering Facebook or Twitter; in fact, some overseas governments actively block their citizens’ access to Western media channels. Instead, adapting to local conditions also means knowing, for instance, that “the largest social network in China is QQ, Orkut is widely used in India and Brazil, Kontakte is strong in Russia, Hi5 is the leading network in Peru, and Maktoob is the choice throughout the Arab world.” 68

Social Media and Managerial and Organizational Effectiveness

With their ease of use, speed, and potentially huge audiences, social media have increasing application for managers’ and organizations’ effectiveness. We will look at social media use in employment recruiting, employee and employer productivity, sales, innovation, and corporate reputation.

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Employment Recruiting

About 82% of companies today use social media for recruiting, especially for recruiting “passive” job candidates, that is, those who aren’t actively looking for a new job. LinkedIn is the most popular (and effective) for this purpose, closely followed by Facebook and Twitter (see  Figure 15.3 ), according to a study of 410 HR professionals. 69  Most companies use more than one of these platforms, with far smaller percentages using Google, YouTube, and Pinterest. 70  Nearly half of recruiters say they use texting to reach job candidates and hiring managers alike. 71  More than 70% of recruiters agree that social media allows them to more easily find candidates with specific sets of skills. Says Jeffery Giesener, CEO and founder of SourceMob, a social recruiting company, “Today, with social being on mobile and with over 4 billion global profiles the appeal [of social recruiting] is so much broader and reaches all demographics.” 72

FIGURE 15.3 Social media sources used for recruiting

Source: R. Maurer, “Survey: Employers Using Social Media to Find Passive Candidates,”  https://www.shrm.org/ResourcesAndTools/hr-topics/talent-acquisition/Pages/Using-Social-Media-Find-Passive-Candidates.aspx , accessed July 2016.

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Craig Fisher, head of employer brand at software firm CA Technologies and CEO of TalentNet, agrees that it’s easier to find people with specific skill sets with social media tools. Managers should be savvy, however. Says Fisher, they should “keep good content flowing that is helpful to their social communities and avoid just ‘asking’ all the time, so that when candidates see these ads and check out the company, they see a helpful resource and interesting culture.” 73

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Bottom of Form

As you probably know, most company websites have a “Jobs” or “Employment” tab where interested job seekers can search and apply for open positions. Beyond this fairly simple interaction, job seekers can also customize their searches on job posting sites like Monster and Indeed.com and apply directly to the hiring firm, attaching resumes, writing samples, links to blogs and videos, and other pertinent information. Companies can also post jobs on industry-specific hosting and social networking platforms, like GitHub (software developers), Dribble (web designers), 74  and Mediabistro (media professionals). More than 60,000 jobs are tweeted on Monster every day. 75  And according to Career Builder’s website, 52% of companies check out potential hires’ social media pages, including their sometimes unguarded profiles on Facebook and LinkedIn. 76

PRACTICAL ACTION

Building Your Professional Profile Online

Employers increasingly value the “full circle view” of job candidates they can get by recruiting them online, 77  and more than half check their social media profiles. 78  Apparently, few are forgiving if they don’t like what they see, however. 79  How can you ensure that the view of yourself you’re projecting is an attractive and positive one? Here are some tips for managing your online image.

1. Regularly update your profile at LinkedIn and industry-specific networking sites. Make sure you list up-to-the-minute and accurate information about your current and recent jobs, and that your increasing level of experience or broadening set of skills is clear from your descriptions. Key words important to recruiters in your industry are as valuable here as they are on your resume.

2. Follow the companies you hope will hire you. Use the Internet to research a small group of companies you want to work for, and then use social media and networking sites to follow them and find or ask for connections to people who work there. Adding these connections to your network demonstrates your interest in the firm. 80  Effective networking takes time, so be patient.

3. Participate in industry-related chat rooms and discussion groups. If you are experienced and knowledgeable in a field and have something to offer, you can contribute positively to ongoing conversations that will raise your profile and introduce your name to new connections. If you’re still learning the ropes, asking intelligent questions can still help your networking efforts. If you’re really an expert in a relevant field, consider starting an industry-specific blog.

4. Edit your general online social presence. While you can and should sensibly limit those who can see your personal information and candid photos online, your overall presence on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and otherPage 523 sites should still reflect a reasonably mature and responsible individual and include nothing you’d be afraid to see in the newspaper. Think before you post anything, anywhere. 81  After all, someday you may “friend” your colleagues at your new job.

YOUR CALL

In which industry or industries would you look for 8 or 10 companies you’d like to work for? What kind of online profile do you think recruiters at those companies would be looking for?

Social media can also lead to hiring discrimination (by revealing applicants’ religious affiliation, age, family composition, or sexual orientation). Says Craig Fisher of TalentNet, “anything that is public information is fair game in researching prospective candidates. When those candidates become applicants, the rules change a bit.” At the same time, “you just can’t use that information in consideration of employment if it is a protected characteristic.” 82

Online or not, recruiting still requires a human touch. Instead of sending rejected applicants away unhappy, Virgin Media hopes to create $7 million in new business by converting them into customers. How? By using lessons learned in customer service to “story board” a memorable recruiting experience. 83

Employee Productivity

While overuse of and even addiction to social media exist and can cause serious problems, 84  there seems little doubt that social media tools at work, used appropriately, can make communication by and among employees more productive. In fact, productivity is a driving force behind the use of all forms of technology at work, including social media. The key for employees, managers, and employers is to harness the speed and reach of social media to enhance individual performance.

Results like reduced turnover, higher performance, increased job satisfaction, and greater creativity and collaboration are common findings in research about the effects of social media. 85  Employees who work remotely are particular beneficiaries of social media’s communications capabilities. Customized scheduling, organizing, networking, document sharing, messaging, and other digital communication options help relieve them of the need to commute, attend routine meetings, and be distracted by colleagues. 86  Digital productivity tools that control e-mail, organize links and contacts, prioritize tasks, and even edit prose can help remote workers stay focused and organized so they can meet deadlines and enjoy work–life balance. 87

Work–life balance. Like this family, vacations are good for everyone. Research shows that everyone needs some down time. It also helps to give our electronic devices a break as well.© David Buffington/Blend Images LLC RFPage 524

At the same time, managers need to remember that employees don’t have to be in touch all the time, no matter how easy it is. There is plenty of evidence that everyone should unplug from e-mail and social media on a regular basis, if not during every evening, weekend, and vacation. 88  Concerned that productivity was actually suffering, health care consulting firm Vynamic began discouraging employees from sending e-mails between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. Monday through Friday and all day on weekends. Job satisfaction is up since the change took place. 89

How often do you use social media while at work? Do you think it is helping or hindering your performance? You can find out by completing  Self-Assessment 15.1 .

SELF-ASSESSMENT 15.1 

To What Extent Are You Effectively Using Online Social Networking at Work?

The following survey was designed to assess how well you are using social networking in your job. Please be prepared to answer these questions if your instructor has assigned Self-Assessment 15.1 in Connect.

1. To what extent are social media helping or hurting your performance at work?

2. Based on your survey scores, what can you do to more effectively use social media at work? Be specific.

3. What policies might companies install to ensure that social media are used in a productive manner? Explain.

Employer Productivity

Companies of all sizes and industries believe in the benefits of social media. Procter and Gamble (P&G) spends more than any other U.S. company on advertising, and it now devotes more than a third of its US marketing budget to digital media. Marc Pritchard, Global Brand Officer, says, “Digital technology … is enabling P&G to expand creativity with an unprecedented delivery machine that is constantly evolving. … This is why P&G is quickly shifting to a digital-first approach to building brands.” 90  If used effectively, social media allow companies to reap many of the benefits listed in  Table 15.5 . 

TABLE 15.5     Social Media Benefits for Employers

BENEFIT	DESCRIPTION
Connect in real time over distance	Employees, customers, communities, suppliers, prospective talent, and many others can communicate as needed and while work is being completed.
Collaborate within and outside organization	Linking sources of knowledge is a means for realizing the potential of employee diversity and enhancing productivity. Social media are by definition a way of connecting people virtually, so their effective implementation benefits virtual teamwork.
Expand boundaries	Social networks can become critical means for organizational innovation and effectiveness, allowing them to utilize knowledge, skills, and experience of people outside (not employed by) the organization.

Adapted from L. McFarland and R. Ployhart, “Social Media: A Contextual Framework to Guide Research and Practice,” Journal of Applied Psychology, 2015, 1653–1677.

The essence of social media is connectivity. If deployed effectively, social media enable businesses to do the following:

· Connect with key stakeholders. The use of social media allows you to connect in real time and over distances with many customers, suppliers, employees, potential talent, and other key stakeholders.

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Connect with varied sources of expertise inside the organization. We’ve seen such connectivity demonstrated in virtual teams, redefining conventional organizational boundaries and drawing on different sources of talent, knowledge, and experience throughout the organization.

· Connect with varied sources of expertise outside the organization. Social media can cross organizational boundaries and connect with outsiders to help in problem solving. An example is crowdsourcing, as we’ll see below. A variant is crowdfunding, raising money via online sources.

On the other hand, if not managed effectively, social media can create many legal, financial, and human resource risks. 91  For instance, each employee who plays fantasy football loses about one hour a week of work time. 92  The price tag for productivity lost to fantasy football was $16 billion in 2015. That’s $1 billion a week during the football season. 93

EXAMPLE

Controlling Social Media Tools

Slack is a real-time communications and collaboration tool for groups or communities, launched in 2013, that includes chat rooms, public and private messaging, and private groups. All its content is shareable and searchable. Slack has been adopted by many companies (and private groups) and now has more than 15 million active users every day. It’s cloud-based and helps companies consolidate their internal communications in one place, relieving some of their reliance on e-mail. 94

At LUSH, for example, a global producer of handmade soaps and cosmetics, reliance on e-mail for internal messages has dropped 75% since Slack was introduced. Given LUSH’s rapid growth, “it’s a struggle at times to maintain consistent communication internally and with our global network—Slack has filled that hole,” says Maddie Saunders, global planner for the firm. “It has improved communication between groups greatly.”95

Some business users find, however, that as with any communication channel, they need to set limits on its use to keep employees from being overwhelmed. One writer advises enforcing a policy for creating consistent user names, dedicating certain channels to messages about specific tasks or projects, giving some users “guest” status with limited access (to protect others’ privacy or fine-tune employees’ focus), and setting up “do not disturb” hours to accommodate users in different time zones. Closed discussions can also be archived to reduce “clutter.” 96

YOUR CALL

Are you familiar with Slack? Do you think the suggestions here would improve its effectiveness (or that of any other internal network) in an organizational environment? What other tips would you suggest?

Social Media and Innovation: Crowdsourcing

If you are looking for an innovative solution to a problem, you might conclude that the more people you have thinking about the problem, the more potential ideas will be generated. That’s the idea behind  crowdsourcing, using the Internet and social media to enlist a group outside the organization for help solving a problem.  The strategy   has drawn a lot of attention, especially for its use in fundraising (crowdfunding) on such sites as Kickstarter, 97  but it has a mixed record of success. 

Some crowdsourcing efforts are organized as competitions, with teams volunteering to solve a problem by a certain deadline and win a cash prize. Netflix, for example, offered $1 million to the team that could come up with an algorithm that would do a better job of recommending movies to customers than what the company was using at the time. A multinational team won with minutes to spare (but the company never implemented its solution). 98  Some companies recruit temporary or contingent workers through crowdsourcing and pay them for their time and efforts whether or not they succeed. 99  Critics say, however, that large groups of people working on a problem have been shown to produce only average results; they advise hiring real experts to get the job done. 100

Because more and more companies are exploring the use of social media to enhance the product development process, researchers are starting to quantitatively study its benefits. Although it is too soon to make a definitive conclusion, results from aPage 526 global study of the product development process in over 660 companies is enlightening. The researchers concluded “despite the promise, the expected positive results are frequently not realized in practice. … We believe that social media provides a game-changing opportunity for companies that learn how to exploit it. But taking advantage of the opportunity requires more than having a Facebook presence with a loyal base of ‘friends’ who say they ‘like’ you. In order to use social media for innovation, organizations need clear strategies and objectives.” 101

Social Media and Sales and Brand Recognition

Is it logical to expect that an “effective” social media presence generates customers and brand recognition? Yes, for the following reasons:

1. Social media can increase product/service awareness and generate customer inquiries.

2. Social media can enhance relationships with customers.

3. Social media can increase the ability to reach customers on a global scale.

4. For small or local businesses, social media can foster co-promotion of local businesses and the image of small businesses in the area. 102

5. Social media can foster consumers’ conversations about brands. 103

Promoting green. This 2009 Volkswagen AG Jetta TDI was named Green Car of the Year by the Green Car Journal in 2008. Do you think this designation helped promote sales of the vehicle? Would your answer change based on the emissions scandal confronting the company in 2015–2016?© Armando Arorizo/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Don’t assume that the mere use of social media automatically results in more sales and brand recognition. Recent research suggests that social media won’t create positive outcomes unless two conditions are present. 104  First, the company must possess both competence in social media skills and technology and commitment in the form of dedicated resources. Second, a successful social media strategy requires consumers or customers with social media skills. If a company is selling a product or service to a segment of the market without such skills, the benefits will not be achieved. 105

Misty Copeland. Misty Copeland performing “Giselle” at the Metropolitan Opera House.© Hiroyuki Ito/Getty Images

UnderArmour scored a big success with its “I Will What I Want” videos of female athletes on YouTube, for example. These brief films were intended to "[empower] women of all shapes and sizes to get moving and not let anyone hold them back,” One notable entry in the series, drawing more than 7.5 million views, featured rising ballet star Misty Copeland, the first African American dancer to be promoted to principal dancer at American Ballet Theater. 106  TOMS Shoes was another social media winner, with an Instagram campaign in which the socially conscious company promised to donate one pair of shoes for every photo someone posted of their own bare feet. Almost 300,000 pairs were donated as a result of the drive. 107  Also popular on Instagram is GoPro’s regular showcasing of user-generated content. Action-camera enthusiasts are invited to post their own photos for the company’s popular Photo of the Day opportunity. 108

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Social Media and Reputation

Some companies have been very successful at using social media to build and protect their reputations online. The benefits are real. 109  Research with KLM Royal Dutch Airline showed that customers who engaged with the company online had more positive perceptions about its reputation. 110

One of the biggest dangers managers face is negative comments about the organization posted by disgruntled customers or even employees. Some tips for defusing these and limiting the harm they can do are: 111

1. Create and enforce a social media policy for employees. We’ll discuss social media policies in more detail. At a minimum your policy should limit what employees can say on the organization’s web pages and ensure that all posted content meets the highest ethical standards. 

2. Appoint experienced managers to monitor your social media presence and respond quickly and appropriately to negative posts. Vitamin Water waited 24 hours before responding to customers voicing anger on Facebook about its new flavor. 112  A Mississippi woman received an insensitive e-mail from her state representative about her problems getting medical supplies for her diabetic child. She posted the legislator’s crass response on Facebook, where it went viral. 113  A great deal of damage can occur online in a short time, and all of it in the public eye.

3. Acknowledge there is a problem. Gracefully accepting that someone has a genuine issue with the organization, its product or service, or its posts—even if the problem is a misunderstanding on his or her part—can go a long way toward defusing bad feelings. If the organization is in error, the appropriate manager should say so and apologize.

4. Take the conversation offline if necessary. If a customer refuses to be satisfied, take the conversation to a private sphere such as phone or e-mail. Not only will this keep it out of the public eye and prevent further damage to the brand but the individualized attention may also reduce the customer’s ire. 

A company’s reputation is affected by posts made by current and former employees. Sites like Glassdoor.com, for instance, allow people to publicly (and anonymously) rate their employers on criteria like salary, benefits, work–life balance, career advancement possibilities, and even the quality of the employment interview. Firms that are confident they have happy employees can encourage them to spread the buzz about office parties, outings, and incentives and rewards on corporate websites, social media, and blogs, building the company’s image as a good place to work. 114

Downsides of Social Media

It’s fair to say the digital age and rise of social media have introduced almost as many difficulties as efficiencies into people’s lives. Some of these problems relate to cyberloafing, security breaches, privacy concerns, and the volume of e-mail.

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Cyberloafing

Lost productivity due to  cyberloafing—using the Internet at work for personal use—is a primary concern for employers in their adoption of social media. Some studies put the cost at $85 billion per year and report that employees spend 60%–80% of their time at work pretending to do actual or legitimate work. 115  How do employees waste time on social media?

· Fifty percent are talking on a cell phone or texting.

· Thirty-nine percent are surfing the Internet.

· Thirty-eight percent are on social media.

· Twenty-three percent are sending personal e-mail. 116

Then there is shopping online while at work. A survey by CareerBuilder found that on average 47% of workers planned to shop online. 117

Software tools can reduce cyberloafing. One program developed by researchers at Arizona State University restricts the websites employees are allowed to access from work, the length of time they are permitted to spend there, or both. The program “significantly” reduced cyberloafing at the company where it was installed. The lead researcher advises that managers engage employees in decisions about how to use such tools, however, both to make sure rules are fair and to make employees feel like “part of the conversation.” 118

Another consideration for managers is that most employees can and do bring their own devices to work and so are perfectly capable of bypassing controls installed on office computers. And, say some observers who think reports of cyberloafing’s extent are exaggerated, taking an online break from work might not be such a bad thing. It can reduce stress and improve concentration. The key, again, is fairness in setting and upholding policies about social media use, which we discuss below. 119

Security: Guarding against Cyberthreats

Security  is defined as a system of safeguards for protecting information technology against disasters, system failures, and unauthorized access that result in damage or loss. Security is a continuing challenge, with computer and cell-phone users constantly having to deal with threats ranging from malicious software (malware) that tries to trick people into yielding passwords and personal information to viruses that can destroy or corrupt data. 120  According to the Norton Cyber Crime Report for 2013, the cost per cybercrime victim shot up to $298, a 50% increase over 2012, with the total cost of those crimes amounting to $113 billion. 121

Biggest hack. Gary McKinnon arrives at the High Courts in London to appeal his extradition to the U.S. He is a Scottish systems administrator and was accused of conducting the biggest U.S. military hack of all time. The British government blocked his extradition order to the U.S. Do you think governments around the world should prosecute hackers like McKinnon to the fullest extent?© John Stillwell/PA Images/AlamyPage 529

Hacking and human error by careless or improperly trained employees are part of the problem and will likely continue to be. 122  A recent poll by the Organization of American States surveyed 575 respondents in North and South America and found that 40% had experienced efforts to shut down their networks. 123  And in a demonstration of just how critical to an organization effective managers really are, internal attacks by disgruntled employees are one of the biggest security threats a business can face. 124  

The key to protecting digital communication systems against fraud, hackers, identity theft, and other threats is prevention. The table below presents some ways to protect yourself. (See  Table 15.6 .) The federal government also offers valuable advice at the FCC’s website. 125  

TABLE 15.6   Protecting against Security and Privacy Breaches on the Internet

· Don’t use passwords that can be easily guessed. Use weird combinations of letters, numbers, and punctuation, and mix uppercase and lowercase, along with special characters such as !, #, and %.

· Don’t use the same password for multiple sites. Avoid using the same password at different sites, since if hackers or scammers obtain one account, they potentially have your entire online life.

· Don’t reveal sensitive information on social networking sites. Even people who set their profiles to Facebook’s strictest privacy settings may find sensitive information leaked all over the web.

· Be careful about free and illegal downloads. File-sharing programs often contain spyware, as do sites containing free and illegal songs, movies, and TV shows.

· Be mindful of liability issues. Employers routinely monitor employee e-mail for offensive messages or risky material that may expose them to lawsuits.

· Keep antivirus software updated. The antivirus software on your computer won’t protect you forever. Visit the antivirus software maker’s website and enable the automatic update features.

Source: Derived from B. K. Williams and S. C. Sawyer, Using Information Technology: A Practical Introduction, 11th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2015), pp. 94, 100, 101, 357, 478.

Privacy: Keeping Things to Yourself

Privacy  is the right of people not to reveal information about themselves. Threats to privacy can range from name migration, as when a company sells its customer list to another company, to online snooping, to government prying and spying. A potentially devastating violation of privacy is  identity theft, in which thieves hijack your name and identity and use your good credit rating to get cash or buy things. Many of the cautions in  Table 15.6  apply here, too.

The most important thing to know about online and social media privacy is that nothing posted is ever truly private. 126  In some cases, Internet users are their own worst enemies, posting compromising images and information about themselves on social networking sites that may be available to, say, potential employers. Others, like the Mississippi representative mentioned previously whose unhelpful response to a constituent in need went viral, disastrously fail to think before they post. It has been said that if you wouldn’t want to see something on the front page of the newspaper, don’t post it.

As for privacy at work, monitoring of electronic communications is widespread. In most circumstances employers are permitted to monitor—that is, read—their employees’ e-mail and track their Internet use, and two-thirds of those in a recent survey said they did so. 127  More than a quarter of all employers in the survey also said they had fired someone for “email misuse,” and more than 7 in 10 have disciplined employees for social media gaffes. 128  And your privacy rights may be limited when you are using your employer’s computer and other equipment. 129  Monitoring can become a source of bias, however, and determined employees can often get around monitoring tools and devices, sometimes weakening the organization’s security protocols in the process. 130

The Need to Manage E-mail

Employees tend to have a love–hate relationship with e-mail. We love that we can send and receive e-mail 24/7 from anywhere. But wePage 530 hate the fact that the average worker can receive hundreds of e-mails a day, and the fact that most of us can handle no more than a few dozen in that time. While texting, social networking, and other forms of electronic and digital communication have begun to reduce the dominance of e-mail, it’s predicted that the number of e-mail users worldwide will continue to grow, reaching nearly 3 billion people (or one-third of the world’s population) by 2019. One reason is that so many other communications applications, as well as online shopping sites, require a valid e-mail address for access. 131

 The table below provides some practical tips for handling e-mail. (See  Table 15.7 .)

TABLE 15.7   Tips for Better E-mail Handling

· Turn off all noncritical notifications and unsubscribe from newsletters. An important first step is to reduce the amount of unnecessary e-mail you get.

· Set aside one or two 15-minute periods each day to review e-mail. Don’t check it compulsively, and try not to read or send e-mails before or after work hours. About 40% of Gen X and Gen Y employees say they do so, but intrusions into off-work hours can disrupt work–life balance.

· Treat all e-mail as confidential. See the discussion of privacy above. Also think twice about including other people in your message who may not need to read it.

· Be brief and professional, and proofread (twice). Keep your message as short as possible and avoid spelling, grammatical, and other errors, especially in people’s names and titles. Save emojis for personal messages.

· Remember that not every topic belongs on e-mail. Complicated or controversial topics may be better discussed on the phone or in person to avoid misunderstandings.

Source: Money (Contributor), Forbes, April 7, 2015, “Why Checking Email After Work is Bad for Your Career–and Health,"  http://fortune.com/2015/04/07/why-checking-email-after-work-is-bad-for-your-career-and-health-2/ , accessed July 2016; A. Samuel “How I Tamed the Email Beast at Work,” Wall Street Journal, March 14, 2016,  http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-i-tamed-the-email-beast-at-work-1457921533 , accessed July 2016; A. Fridman, “How to Stop Email Distractions at Work,” Inc. June 23, 2016,  http://www.inc.com/adam-fridman/how-to-stop-email-distractions-at-work.html , accessed July 2016; D. Ecker, “15 Clever Tips for Managing Email Overload at Work,” Redbooth, July 15, 2015  https://redbooth.com/blog/managing-email-overload , accessed July 2016. 

Managerial Implications of Texting

Common sense says that a colleague or customer standing in front of you or talking to you by phone or videoconference deserves your full and immediate attention, while the person texting you about your plans for the evening can wait. But texting does have some legitimate workplace applications. How can managers best make use of its capabilities?

Many feel that those who deal directly with customers should not be texting at work. A cashier, a crossing guard, a customer service rep, and a salesperson—not to mention a cab or bus driver—are good examples of employees whose phones should be tucked in a bag or a drawer at all times. 132  At the same time, some very limited use of texting for personal reasons at work, in the right time and place, can be a big help in increasing work–life balance and relieving stress. 133

If texting is an integral part of your workplace communications—not least because it can reduce costs and eliminate the time phone customers spend waiting on hold 134 —ideally it should be covered under the organization’s social media policy (discussed below). Who participates in or initiates group messages, for instance? How quickly are people expected to reply to texts? For what purposes can texts be sent, and to whom?

Here are a few tips for making the most of texting for work purposes: 135

1. As with all social media tools, strictly limit your use for personal reasons during the work day. It helps to let your friends and family know you will not respond while at work.

2. Text only important messages. Avoid using texting for routine information, and make it clear in your message why it is urgent. As always, be brief. If you must deliver bad news, be courteous and do it over the phone or in person.

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3. Avoid texting during meetings. Not only is it rude to text during a meeting; it’s likely the people you might need to text will be in the meeting with you, so there should be no problem leaving your phone behind.

4. Don’t use abbreviations or emojis. Abbreviations like “omw” and “btw” look unprofessional in a business message and can confuse some readers. Save emojis for texts with family and friends.

5. As always, proofread. Read every message before sending, and be especially alert for potential miscommunication instigated by auto-correct features.  

Managerial Considerations in Creating Social Media Policies

The purpose of a social media policy at work is not to completely close off employees’ access to personal e-mails and texts or even to shopping websites. Many employees already feel guilty if they need to deal with personal messages at work but say they would quit their job if their ability to do at least some personal tasks during the work day were restricted. 136  And while as much as half of social media use during work hours may be taking place for non-work reasons, many employees do use social media for constructive work purposes, such as making and nurturing professional connections and seeking solutions to problems from those both inside and outside the organization. 137  

Social Media Policy 

A  social media policy  describes the who, how, when, and for what purposes of social media use, and the consequences for noncompliance. Such a policy can not only clarify expectations and relieve guilt but also prevent impulsive or abusive posts and messages that can damage an organization’s or an individual’s reputation. The elements of an effective social media policy are outlined in  Table 15.8 .

TABLE 15.8 Seven Elements of an Effective Social Media Policy

ELEMENT	DESCRIPTION
Create safe channels for employees to air their concerns before going online.	The key words here are safe and before. Conflicts happen, but managers and organizations should provide means by which employees’ concerns are reported and handled without retaliation so they don’t feel the need to take them to the Internet.
Clarify what is confidential.	Clearly explain what information employees can and cannot share online. Providing an approval process for the release of information may help, too.
Outline consequences for violations.	Make it known that employees can be held responsible for what they post (such as videos of undesirable behavior on the job or in company uniform), and list the consequences.
Discuss appropriate ways to engage others online.	It is typically a poor idea to have any and all employees responding to others’ comments about the company online. Instruct them to be polite and nonconfrontational, and then to notify the designated person to respond.
Explain what is considered illegal.	It is illegal to divulge proprietary information and to violate trademarks and copyrights. The organization is responsible for educating employees on these matters.
Align social media policy with the organization’s culture.	Your company’s social media policy is a great place to reaffirm what you want your company culture to be while conveying your stance on this serious topic.
Educate employees.	It’s not enough to have a social media policy; it is necessary to educate and train people about it and to embed it in social media practices. (One of the authors, for instance, could not locate a social media policy, or a person responsible for it, at his university.)

Adapted from A. Akitunde, “Employees Gone Wild: Eight Reasons You Need a Social Media Policy TODAY,” Open Forum, August 15, 2013,  http://www.openforum.com/articles/employee-social-media-policy/ , accessed September 9, 2013.

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The Example box below describes selected elements of several companies’ current social media policies.

EXAMPLE

A Sampling of Social Media Policies

Here are selected provisions from some prominent companies’ social media policies. 138

At Adidas, employees may say in their posts that they work for the company but must label their personal posts as such. They are not permitted to post any sensitive information, such as about new products or pending legal actions.

Best Buy employees are prohibited from posting racial, ethnic, sexual, religious, and physical disability slurs.

Hewlett-Packard “reserves the right to edit or amend any misleading or inaccurate content depicted in blog posts” and to “delete blog posts violating the code of conduct.”

GAP encourages caution when discussing topics like politics and religion online and recommends fixing any goofs immediately. The company’s social media team is available to help in case of serious problems with a post.

Reporters at the Los Angeles Times are advised to observe “principles of integrity, professionalism, privacy and impartiality” 139  in their posts and to verify any factually questionable content before posting. 

Intel asks employees to stick to what they know and to specify that their posts “don’t necessarily represent Intel’s positions, strategies, or opinions.” It also requires them to disclose their ”former employee" status on their social media profiles once they have left the company.

YOUR CALL

One writer says that since employees today are unable to fully separate their personal posts from the reputation of their organization, each one is, in effect, “a mouthpiece, a critic, a supporter, a case in point, an endorsement, a walking billboard.” 140

Do you agree or disagree? Do you think having a social media policy can effectively mitigate the dangers of allowing employees to fill these roles?

Assessing an Organization’s Social Media Readiness

Consider the social media readiness of an organization to which you belong.  Self-Assessment 15.2  helps you assess leadership’s attitude toward social media, such as

· How supportive management is of creating communities.

· How well the culture fosters collaboration and knowledge sharing.

· How widely social media is used to collaborate.

With this knowledge you can determine how well your own attitudes fit with those of the organization, and it may even unveil opportunities for you to improve the organization’s readiness.

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15.5

Improving Communication Effectiveness

MAJOR QUESTION How can I be a better listener, writer, and speaker?

THE BIG PICTURE

We describe how you can be a more effective listener, as in learning to concentrate on the content of a message, communicating nondefensively, and employing empathy. We offer four tips for becoming a more effective writer. Finally, we discuss how to be an effective speaker, through three steps.

Given that research suggests managers spend more than 75% of their time communicating, and that poor communication is estimated to cost organizations more than $9.3 billion annually, 141  it’s no surprise that written and verbal communications skills are among the top five qualities employers look for most in college graduates. (Leadership, teamwork, and problem-solving skills are the other three.) 142    

How would you assess your communication skills? Do you think you are better than most? You can find out by completing the following self-assessment. If your score is lower than you prefer, find ideas for improving your interpersonal skills.

SELF-ASSESSMENT 15.3  

Assessing My Communication Competence 

This scale measures your communication competence. Please be prepared to answer these questions if your instructor has assigned Self-Assessment 15.3 in Connect.

1. Are you surprised by the results? Explain.

2. Based on your scores, what are your top three strengths and your three biggest weaknesses? 

3. How might you use your strengths more effectively in your role as a student?

4. How might you improve on your weaknesses?

Let’s see how you can be more effective at the essential communication skills.

Nondefensive Communication

Using evaluative or judgmental comments such as “Your work is terrible” or “You’re always late for meetings” spurs defensiveness, which can lead to  defensive communication—either aggressive, attacking, angry communication or passive, withdrawing communication. The better alternative is  nondefensive communication—communication that is assertive, direct, and powerful.

You may be surprised to learn that defensiveness is often triggered by nothing more than a poor choice of words or nonverbal posture during interactions. In the language of behavior modification, these triggers are antecedents of defensiveness. For example, using absolutes like “always” or “never” is very likely to create a defensive response. Try to avoid using absolutes because they are rarely true. You can instead increase your communication competence by avoiding the defensive antecedents and employing the positive antecedents of nondefensive communication shown in  Table 15.9 .

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TABLE 15.9   Antecedents of Defensive and Nondefensive Communication

TOWARD DEFENSIVENESS	TOWARD NONDEFENSIVENESS
STYLE	EXAMPLE	STYLE	EXAMPLE
Evaluative	“Your work is sloppy.”	Descriptive	“Your work was two days late.”
Controlling	“You need to …”	Problem solving	"What do you think are the causes of the missed deadline?
Strategizing	"I’d like you to agree with me during the meeting so that we can overcome any challenges."	Straightforward	"Vote your conscious at the meeting. You can agree or disagree with my proposal."
Neutral	"Don’t worry about missing the deadline. It’s no big deal.”	Empathetic	"I sense you are disappointed about missing the deadline. Let’s figure out how we can get back on schedule."
Superior	"Listen to me, I’ve worked here 20 years."	Equal	"Let’s figure out the causes of the missed deadline together."
Certain	"We tried this idea in the past. It just doesn’t work."	Honest and open	Using I-messages: “I am angry about the way you spoke to the customer because our department looked unresponsive.”

Based on J. R. Gibb, “Defensive Communication,” Journal of Communication, 1961, 141–148; and “Reach Out: Effective Communication,” Sunday Business Post, April 14, 2013.

Some steps to achieving nondefensive communication are build relationships first, frame your message into terms that acknowledge the receiver’s point of view, free yourself of prejudice and bias, practice full disclosure, and pick a time and place conducive to communicating and listening. Finally, avoid jargon. 143  

Given that we want you to learn how to promote nondefensive communication, we encourage you to complete  Self-Assessment 15.4 . It assesses whether a current or past work environment is supportive of nondefensive communication.

SELF-ASSESSMENT 15.4 

Does Your Organization Have a Supportive or Defensive Communication Climate?

The following survey was designed to assess the supportive and defensive communication climate of your organization. Please be prepared to answer these questions if your instructor has assigned Self-Assessment 15.4 in Connect.

1. Where does the work environment stand in terms of having a supportive or defensive communication climate?

2. Based on your survey scores, what advice would you give to management in order to promote a more supportive communication climate? Be specific.

3. Considering your project teams at school, what can you do to create a more supportive communication climate in these teams?

Using Empathy

Although researchers propose multiple types of empathy, the general consensus is that  empathy  represents the ability to recognize and understand another person’s feelings and thoughts. 144  It is a reflective technique that fosters open communication. Empathy worksPage 535 for managers because it is not the same thing as uncritically accepting others’ words and behavior; rather, it relies on a conscious effort to understand the emotional impact of our own words and behavior. 145  According to Anand Mahindra, CEO of the Indian multinational organization Mahindra Group, “true empathy is rooted in humility and the understanding that there are many people with as much to contribute in life as you.” 146  

Being empathetic requires two key actions. The first is mindfulness. Empathy necessitates that we place our attention on the feelings and emotions being displayed both verbally and nonverbally by others. The second action is to incorporate our understanding of another person’s feelings and thoughts into our communications. This will lead us to use language that fits the receiver’s perspective.

Using empathy. Does the sales representative on the right appear empathetic toward the customer’s complaint about returning an appliance? How might empathy be shown in this context?© allesalltag/Alamy

Empathy leads to more effective communication and interaction because people feel heard. 147  It also sends the message that we care about others. Although women are often more empathetic, studies show that everyone can learn this skill with training and practice. 148  In fact, medical students in the United States are increasingly being trained to use empathy when talking with patients, and the admissions test for medical school will now include questions designed to test applicants’ existing understanding of psychology and human behavior. “Empathy is a cognitive attribute, not a personality trait,” says Mohammadreza Hojat, a research professor of psychiatry at Jefferson Medical College. 149

Being an Effective Listener

“Listening is the single most important and underrated skill in business, in social media, and in life. It’s something we can always improve on,” says Dave Kerpen, founder and CEO of social media software firm Likeable Local. 150  Richard Branson, entrepreneurial founder and CEO of the Virgin Group, agrees. The lesson he learned from his father was “Listen more than you speak. Nobody learned anything by hearing themselves speak.” 151

Actively listening, truly listening, requires more than just hearing, which is merely the physical component.  Active listening is the process of actively decoding and interpreting verbal messages. Active listening requires full attention and processing of information, which hearing does not.

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There is general consensus that listening is a cornerstone skill of communication competence. In studies that support this conclusion, active listening made receivers feel more understood. It also led people to conclude that their conversations were more helpful, sensitive, and supportive. 152  Clearly, active listening yields positive outcomes.

Unfortunately, many of us think we are good listeners when evidence suggests just the opposite. For example, researchers estimate that typical listeners retain only 20%–50% of what they hear. 153

Understand me. What’s the recipe for effective listening—for really finding out what someone has to say? Probably it is listen, watch, write, think, question. What do you do to fight flagging concentration if you’re tired or bored? You suppress negative thoughts, ignore distractions about the speaker’s style of delivery or body language, and encourage the speaker with eye contact, an interested expression, and an attentive posture. This will make you more involved and interested in the subject matter.© Image Source/PunchStock RF

Why do you think we miss or lose so much of what we hear? One reason is that we have the cognitive capacity to process words at a much higher rate than people speak. This means our cognitive processes are being underutilized, leading to daydreaming and distractions. Noise is another reason. A third reason, and one you can control, is your motivation to listen and your listening style. It takes effort to actively listen. You won’t be a better listener unless you are motivated to become one.

Understand Your Listening Style—or Styles

You can improve your communication competence by understanding your typical listening style. There are four styles: 154

1. Active—I’m fully invested. Active listeners are “all in.” They are motivated to listen and give full attention when others are talking. They focus on what is being communicated and expend energy by participating in the discussion. They put their phone away, withhold judgment, and listen silently. They also use positive body language, such as leaning in or making direct eye contact, to convey their interest. 155

2. Involved—I’m partially invested. Involved listeners devote only some of their attention and energy to listening. They reflect on what is being said and half-halfheartedly participate in the discussion. Their nonverbal cues can show interest and noninterest in the same conversation. If you tend to check your texts while having a meal with friends, you may be only an involved listener in the real-life interaction. Next time try having everyone put his or her phone in the center of the table until the check arrives.

3. Passive—It’s not my responsibility to listen. Passive listeners are not equal partners in a speaking–listening exchange. They assume the speaker is responsible for the quality of the interaction and believe their role is to passively take in information. Passive listeners will display attentiveness, but they can fake it at times. Overall, they don’t expend much motivation or energy in receiving and decoding messages. Is this your listening style during course lectures?

4. Detached—I’m uninterested. Detached listeners tend to withdraw from the interaction. They appear inattentive, bored, distracted, and uninterested. They may start using mobile devices during the speaking–listening exchange. Their body language will reflect lack of interest, such as slumping and avoiding direct eye contact. It is all too easy to tune out an unimaginative PowerPoint presentation during a meeting, for example.

Do you think you are an effective listener? Do you have a sense for what may be your bad listening habits? You can find out by completing  Self-Assessment 15.5 .

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SELF-ASSESSMENT 15.5 

Assessing Your Listening Style

The following survey was designed to assess the overall strength of your listening skills. Please be prepared to answer these questions if your instructor has assigned Self-Assessment 15.5 in Connect.

1. Is your listening style detached, passive, or involved? Based on your survey scores, what can you do to become more of an involved listener? Be specific.

2. Think of two ways you can practice better listening in your teams at work or school. Be specific.

Concentrate on the Content of the Message

Effective listening is a learned skill, so it takes energy and desire to develop it. Basically, however, it comes down to paying attention to the content of the message. Following are some suggestions for increasing your listening skills, which you can practice in your college lectures and seminars. (See  Table 15.10 .)

TABLE 15.10  Tips for Effective Listening

1. Show respect. Give everyone the opportunity to explain his or her ideas without interrupting. Actively try to help the sender convey his or her message.

2. Listen from the first sentence. Turn off your internal thoughts and whatever you were thinking about prior to the interaction.

3. Be mindful. Stay in the moment and focus on the sender. Don’t try to figure out what the speaker is going to say or mentally compose your response.

4. Keep quiet. You have two ears and one mouth; use them accordingly. Try to use the 80/20 rule: Your conversational partner should speak 80% of the time, and you should speak 20%.

5. Ask good questions. Asking relevant questions clarifies what is being said and demonstrates that you are listening.

6. Paraphrase and summarize. Paraphrasing amounts to repeating back to someone what you just heard that person say. Summarizing is used to integrate or consolidate an entire conversation. Both these techniques enhance communication accuracy because they help ensure you are correctly understanding the messages.

7. Remember what was said. Either take notes or make an effort to log critical information into your mental computer.

8. Involve your body. Use nonverbal cues to demonstrate interest and involvement.

Sources: Based on J. Keyser, “Active Listening Leads to Business Success,” T+D, July 2013, pp. 26–28; and B. Brooks, “The Power of Active Listening,” The American Salesman, December 2010, pp. 28–30. T. Bradberry, “7 Most Common Habits of the Best Listeners,” Inc.,  http://www.inc.com/travis-bradberry/7-things-great-listeners-do-differently.html , accessed July 2016.

Being an Effective Writer

Writing is an essential management skill, all the more so because e-mail and texting have replaced the telephone in so much of business communication. Taking a business writing class can be a major advantage. (Indeed, as a manager, you may have to identify employees who need writing training.) Following are some tips for writing business communications more effectively. 

Start with Your Purpose

Rather than building up to the point, if you are delivering routine or positive news you should start by telling your purpose and stating what you expect of the reader. Along the same lines, when e-mailing, make sure the subjectPage 538 line clearly expresses your reason for writing. For instance, “Who is available Thursday afternoon?” does not inform the reader of your topic as well as “Davis project meeting moved to Thursday 3 p.m.” does.

Write Simply, Concisely, and Directly

Short and sweet is the key. 156  Keep your words simple and use short words, sentences, and phrases. Be direct instead of vague, and use active rather than passive voice. (Directness, active voice: “Please call a meeting for Wednesday.” Vagueness, passive voice: “It is suggested that a meeting be called for Wednesday.”)

Know Your Audience

Send your message to all who need the information it contains, but only to those people. Resist the urge to include everyone, and be especially careful, in responding to messages, to think before you click “Reply All.” If you are feeling emotional as you write, don’t click “Send” at all but instead save your draft, take a break of at least a few hours, and go back to it later. Your feelings may have changed and your communication, and your relationships, will likely be better for it.

Don’t Show Ignorance of the Basics

Texting has made many people more relaxed about spelling and grammar rules. Although this is fine among friends, as a manager you’ll need to create a more favorable impression in your writing. Besides using spelling and grammar checkers, proofread your writing before sending it on. Check people’s names and titles in particular, and be especially aware that auto-correct features can make incorrect assumptions about what you meant to say.

Some other tips are shown below. (See  Table 15.11 .)

TABLE 15.11   Five Rules for Business Writing, Both Online and Offline

DON’T …

1. Begin an e-mail with “Hey.” “Hi” or “Hello” is more appropriate.

2. Use abbreviations or emojis.

DO …

3. Spell words correctly.

4. Use complete sentences.

5. Use proper capitalization and punctuation.

Source: Derived from J. R. Fine, “Enhancing Gen Y Communication Skills,” Society for Human Resource Management, March 13, 2009. G. Leibowitz, “6 Tips for Writing Emotionally Intelligent Emails,” Inc.,  http://www.inc.com/glenn-leibowitz/how-to-write-emotionally-intelligent-emails.html , accessed July 2016.

Being an Effective Speaker

We speak in many different circumstances, from one-on-one conversations, to meetings, to formal presentations. In terms of personal oral communication, most of the best advice comes under the heading of listening, since effective listening governs the amount and content of the talking you need to do. 157

The ability to talk to a room full of people—to make an oral presentation—is one of the greatest skills you can have. And in case you think you don’t have this skill, “everyone has public speaking ability,” according to one writer for the London Speaker Bureau. It’s simply that some people are more practiced because they have the opportunity to use it more than others. 158  

While 20% of working professionals in a recent survey said they take almost any steps to avoid public speaking, 70% agreed that the ability to make a skillful presentation was “critical” to their careers. And even more said they would like to be better at it. 159  In fact, reports of how widespread fear of public speaking is are probably exaggerated; it’s likely that about 40%–45% of the population shares this fear. 160  Some people find public speaking a stimulating challenge and an opportunity to burnish their professional skills and reputation.

However you feel or think you feel about public speaking, there is no doubt you’ll have to call upon your presentation skills during your career. You can find some good models in the many TED talks available online. 161  And you can do away with a great deal of anxiety about speaking in public by knowing what and how to prepare. For instance, ask ahead of time about who the audience will be, how much time you will be allowed, what technology might be available for incorporating audio or visual material, who else may be speaking, and whether there will be a question-and-answer session afterwards. Arrive early and check the room to be sure promised equipment is in place and working. As for the content of your presentation, Dale Carnegie’s classic advice still holds: (1) Tell them what you’re going to say. (2) Say it. (3) Tell them what you said. 162

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1. Tell Them What You’re Going to Say

The introduction should take 5%–15% of your speaking time, and it should prepare the audience for the rest of the speech. Avoid jokes and such tired phrases as “I’m honored to be with you here today. …” Because everything in your speech should be relevant, be bold and go right to the point with a “grabber” such as a personal story or compelling comparison that attracts listeners’ attention and prepares them to follow you closely. 163  For example:

“Good afternoon. You may not have thought much about identity theft, and neither did I until my identity was stolen—twice. Today I’ll describe how our supposedly private credit, health, employment, and other records are vulnerable to theft and how you can protect yourself.”

2. Say It

The main body of the speech takes up 75%–90% of your time. The most important thing to realize is that your audience won’t remember more than a few points, anyway. Choose them carefully and cover them as succinctly as possible.

Needless to say, your success rests largely on how well you deliver this part of the speech. Be sure you have done your homework. Speak about what you know best, understand your audience’s point of view and preconceptions, and check and recheck your facts. These preparatory steps enhance your confidence and ensure you have credibility with your listeners.

When you practice this part of your presentation, be particularly attentive to transitions during the main body of the speech. Listening differs from reading in that the listener has only one chance to get your meaning. Thus, be sure you constantly provide your listeners with guidelines and transitional phrases so they can see where you’re going. Example:

“There are five ways the security of your supposedly private files can be compromised. The first way is. … The second way takes place when. …”

3. Tell Them What You Said

The end might take 5%–10% of your time. Many professional speakers consider the conclusion to be as important as the introduction, so don’t drop the ball here. You need a solid, strong, persuasive wrap-up.

Predictor for success. Enjoying public speaking and being good at it are the top predictors of success and upward mobility. Do you think you could develop these skills?© Hill Street Studios/Blend Images/Alamy RF

Use some sort of signal phrase that cues your listeners that you are heading into your wind-up. Examples:

“Let’s review the main points. …”

“In conclusion, what CAN you do to protect against unauthorized invasion of your private files? I point out five main steps. One. …”

Give some thought to the last thing you will say. It should be strongly upbeat, a call to action, a thought for the day, a little story, a quotation. Examples:

“I want to leave you with one last thought. …”

“Finally, let me close by sharing something that happened to me. …”

“As Albert Einstein said, ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge.’”

Then say, “Thank you,” and stop. ●