Self Esteem/Self Efficacy and Communication/Team Building

As an employee what do you want from your job? Can flexibility, better pay, shorter hours, and more benefits be an inducement to perform higher? What truly motivates us with our jobs and how can we synthesize this to benefit us in the long run? Do you have a work/life balance with your organization? This week’s topics remind me of working in a corporate environment and not feeling empowered to share new ideas related to work processes or experiencing poor leadership. Needless to say in this instance my motivation to continue working at this organization dwindled and ultimately I hired my skills out to another organization that was able to meet my needs. As a leader I was charged with motivating others to perform higher to meet set goals and objectives however; this was a daunting task at times especially when some members regularly ‘went through the motions’ and failed to perform at a higher standard. One important component to understanding the employee and the working environment can be linked to the job performance model. The job performance model provides an example of an integrated approach to conceptualizing motivational processes in the workplace (Mitchell & Daniels, 2003). The approach accounts for individual characteristics as well as the organizational context.

The job characteristics model includes skill variety, task identity, task significance (or human interaction), autonomy, and feedback. These connect to the critical psychological states that are associated with employee motivation, including experienced meaningfulness of the work, experienced responsibility for outcomes, and knowledge of actual results. These critical psychological states, as a group, collectively influence personal and work outcomes (Baack, 2012).

At your organization how does management assist workers with goal setting to enhance performance and ensure the goals are measureable and attainable? Nothing is worse than having unreachable goals tied to incentives or rewards i.e. pay increase. How does your organization’s pay philosophy or performance based pay system contribute to your overall performance and motivation to complete assigned tasks? You may want to ask yourself what your organization could do better to assist you to perform even higher.

Groups and Teams

Within many organizations there are groups and teams linked with the common goal of meeting goals and objectives. A group consists of two or more people, interacting, with a common purpose or goal (Schein, 1980). Two types of groups are present in various companies: formal and informal.

A formal group is established by the organization and seeks to achieve company goals and objectives. You can find evidence of the existence of a formal group in company documents, including an organization chart, a management directive to form a group, or group meeting minutes. Three of the most common types of formal groups are work groups, committees, and project teams (Baack, 2012).  An informal group, or a friendship group, emerges without the endorsement of organizational leaders and does not have a designated structure or work toward organizational goals other than socialization and friendship (Shirky, 2004). Three forces tend to bring informal groups together: activities, shared sentiments, and interactions. How groups determined at your workplace and what are the primary functions? How does your organization assist the group in maintaining cohesion and functionality?

When teams are functioning one issue that can threaten collaboration involves groupthink. Have you ever had an idea while participating in a group only to have it dismissed as everyone gravitates towards collective thought due to pressure? Groupthink results when group pressures for conformity become so intense that the group avoids unusual, minority, or unpopular views. At the extreme, groupthink becomes a process by which the group develops a sense of invulnerability, believing it can function without outside influence or sanction. The group self-censors information and fails to perform effectively with organizational confines (Janis, 1991). I enjoy this chapter on groups and it contains some insightful information on how teams can perform or fail depending on the dynamics.

Conflict

Have you been in a situation in the working environment and a disagreement threatens to create a toxic environment? How do you personally handle conflict? Can a team survive conflict and maintain cohesion? How would you introduce healthy conflict in your organization and what could be a positive outcome? In the context of organizational behavior, conflict may be defined as a circumstance in which one party negatively affects or seeks to negatively affect another party (Thomas, 1992). Conflict can be observable or perceived (Wall & Callister, 1995), which means that someone may believe a conflict, exists even when it would be difficult to point out as an observable event. Conflict and negotiation are closely related concepts, in that both suggest that two parties are involved, and both seek to impose their will or gain in a disputed situation. I can recall witnessing a team’s implosion as they could not move past conflict and ultimately had to be reassigned due to lack of performance. Successful managers should understand the concept behind conflict and identify ways to resolve it or introduce healthy conflict for the sake of performance.

References

Baack, D. (2012). Organizational behavior. San Diego, CA: Bridgepoint Education, Inc.

Janis, I. (1991). Groupthink. In B. M. Staw (Ed.), Psychological dimensions of organizational behavior. New York: MacMillan.

Schein, E. H. (1980). Organizational Psychology (3rd ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Shirky, C. (2004, February). Watching the patterns emerge. Harvard Business Review, 34–35.

Thomas, K. W. (1992). Conflict and negotiation processes in organizations. In M. D. Dunnette & L. M. Hough (Eds.), Handbook of industrial and organizational psychology (2nd ed., Vol. 3). Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press.

Wall, J. A., Jr., & Callister, R. R. (1995). Conflict and its management. Journal of Management, 21(3), 517.